LARB Quarterly, no. 41: Truth

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THE LARB QUARTERLY No. 41 SPRING 2024

Rachel Cusk in conversation with

Ira Sachs

Wendi

Jean

Claire Shaffer

Nada Alic

Sarah

Leo

Peter

Introduced by Perwana Nazif

Response by Aria Aber FICTION

106 INVENTED JEWISH FOLKTALES

Sam Sax 111 PLAYBOY

Constance Debré 114 AUNT JELENA

Marina Gudelj

translated by Ena Selimović

120 EXCERPTED FROM FIRST LIGHT

CAConrad

121 “IN ORDER TO BE AWAY FROM THE SITE OF THE MURDER OF HER SON, TAMIR RICE, SAMARIA MOVED OUT OF HER CLEVELAND HOME AND INTO A HOMELESS SHELTER.”

Remica Bingham-Risher

122 WIND ENOUGH TO BEND THESE TREES

Christopher Kondrich

123 THE OPEN DOOR

Chloe Martinez

125 THE SILENT BROTHER

Hermann Burger

translated by Daniele Pantano

126 MESSAGE FOR JIM IN SYRIA

David Roderick

128 THE BLUE MARBLE

Ghayath Almadhoun

translated by Catherine Cobham

An engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary readers

An entertaining tour of Old English words for animals, from the author of The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English, which Neil Gaiman called “a delightful book”

A sweeping new account of ancient Greek culture and its remarkable diversity

A philosopher explores the transformative role of wonder and awe in an uncertain world

Dear reader,

On the evening of March 8, 1971, for the first time in history, a pair of professional boxers who were each undefeated and each had a legitimate claim to the world heavyweight title were scheduled to fight one another. Though technically stripped of his belts for refusing to report to the armed forces in 1967, Muhammad Ali was by that point the most famous athlete on the planet; in Ali’s nominal absence, Joe Frazier had become recognized by the boxing authorities as the division’s title holder. Billed as “The Fight of the Century,” the bout at Madison Square Garden guaranteed each man $2.5 million—a little over 19 million dollars in 2024. Frazier won in 15 rounds on all cards, a decision Ali decried as political.

While some 300 million people around the world watched the fight on closed-circuit broadcasts, an activist group called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI field office in Pennsylvania. The documents they stole, then passed on to reporters, revealed a series of programs, sinister and illegal, designed to surveil, harass, and even kill American citizens. Known as COINTELPRO, the efforts targeted anti–Vietnam War protesters, suspected communists, and the Black Panthers, among many others. These are the files that include plots against Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton.

Ghastly crimes in the alleged pursuit of “truth” are nothing new for powerful states. During World War II, Nazi scientists experimented on concentration camp prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war, flooding their brains with drugs; at home, MKUltra initiatives left some unwitting subjects psychologically destroyed for life. All of this in supposed pursuit of a truth serum—a chemical shortcut to a place that doesn’t really exist.

In the 41st issue of the LARB Quarterly, our writers and poets prod at this ludicrous idea of objective inquiry. Sarah Yanni gets at it from the opening moments of her essay about calling off a wedding: “Language is a thing with an objective.” Angles, motives, biases, blind spots. The invented folktales in our excerpt of Sam Sax’s Yr Dead “needle in the space between truth and fact, between the authenticity of feeling and the fiction of history.” There is what is literally observable, measurable, inarguable. But that’s not what we’re really talking about, is it?

Yours, Paul

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Civil Rights in Bakersfield

Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley BY OLIVER A. ROSALES

Modernism’s Magic Hat

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Building Little Saigon

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Loose of Earth

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Visible Ruins

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Portraits of Persistence

Inequality and Hope in Latin America

EDITED BY JAVIER AUYERO

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I’M ONLY INTERESTED IN THE REAL

A Conversation with Ira Sachs

by Rachel Cusk

One might call Ira Sachs a writer’s filmmaker. His subtle scenarios adhere to—and glory in—the confines of the same reality the writer apprehends through language, a reality whose moral composition and problems of subjectivity are as tangible as its spatial and visual parameters. Each of his seven films, dramas that could be called “domestic” were they not so finely connected to the outer politics of their time and place, takes the distinctive form that has become the stamp of his filmmaking: the presentation of a surface that the film breaks and penetrates with a patient, relentless momentum, until its truth is revealed.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Ira Sachs takes upon himself the full difficulty of the lived moment, which his medium offers countless temptations to elude or falsify. Most importantly, his films acknowledge the presence of the self, its content, its experience, in the process of representation: this is how we know they are true. To describe them as autobiographical is, in this context, to offer them the highest artistic accolade. The very last thing, it seems to me, that film can do easily and comfortably is to preserve what might be called, not a style or a vision, but a voice.

In Passages, his most recent film, that voice is instantly recognizable: passionate and compassionate, alert to the hidden violence of human interaction, embroiled yet unable to interfere, like an observant child who has no power over what he sees unfolding in front of him. The film, with outstanding performances by its triangle of actors (Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulos), is a magnificently delicate exploration of the politics of desire, power, and possession in intimate relationships. In its management of sexuality and the body—in this case via a collision of gay and straight narratives—it is perhaps his boldest venture to date. Its “writerly” quality yields depths of character and moral complexity that indeed seem novelistic, yet the contemporary immediacy of its visual world achieves something much more lifelike. The film was shot in Paris, and though the majority of Ira Sachs’s films are American tales, this more heterogenous sense of place speaks to his European influences and gives his vision a new universality.

It was in Paris, while he was making Passages, that I got to know Ira better, and this conversation about his work is in a sense a distillation of our conversations and correspondence over the past while. •

Rachel Cusk: I’ve found that, even though I have millions and millions of questions to ask you, the first thing I wrote is “How are you feeling about Passages?” For me, your work is such a continuum. It’s a world, it’s a territory that is very, very distinctively yours, and yet, it also feels so lifelike—such a living thing—that one enters it through various doors. The door is the film, the particular film that you happen to be watching, but once you’re in the film, you know that you’re in this reality again.

Passages has that feeling, and yet, there’s a distinct kind of urgency about it. I wondered whether that urgency was personal to you, whether it had to do with the moment of life you’re in, to do with your oeuvre and its momentum, where it suddenly felt that you were, by sticking to your guns, by sticking to your aesthetic, you were, at the same time, sort of bursting out into the world in a different way. I feel that I can actually relate to that—this way of keeping to an aesthetic as a kind of movement in itself. Or even a triumph of will or force. People actually start to get what you’re doing. All that is to say that it seemed to me that Passages was getting recognition in a bigger way, and I was wondering how you were feeling about it?

Ira Sachs: Well, you’re saying a lot of things there that I—

I’m not a very good interviewer.

No, no, that describes a lot of things that I feel. You’re a good observer in the

sense that I feel my films are so closely connected to who I am in the moment in which they are made. They seem to be me. I could see myself grow up in the course of the films, and I think that’s the advantage of always having created my own work. But you know, you could look at Hollywood studio directors, and I’m sure you could find similar narratives, the difference between late Wyler and early Wyler or something like that. Of course, he didn’t create all the work. But I think what is convenient is that I’m generally trying to work on something new. So, the positive thing about the experience of Passages is nothing hurt, for the most part, since the film has entered the public sphere. And so, that’s like ground underneath my feet, which I’m really appreciative of, and it gives me a place to stand. But I’m working on something new. So, there are no laurels to rest on because you’re ahead, right?

I think, at a certain point, when I began working on a new project, it was like, Oh, people liked that. Will I be able to repeat something that people liked? Which has disappeared. Now it’s just like, Can I make something good and meaningful to me? Can I realize the amorphous shape of something into reality? And that’s what I want to wake up thinking about. I think my career’s based on a Montessori education to some extent. You get approval for finishing certain things in order, but then, also, you have expectations of finishing the next thing. So, to me, it’s always, what is the next thing?

I don’t know whether a Montessori education creates a person who is not tormented

by shame. I don’t think you are tormented by shame.

Oh, god, no, I have been. My life shame would be the theme that I would say is consistent.

I’ve thought many, many times that what is so strange and distinctive in your work and your voice is that it is novelistic, that watching one of your films is so close to reading. For me, when the image comes so close to the word, it raises questions about the moral status of literature. I wonder about the idea of words and being satisfied to suggest the image that the reader then sort of screens in their head. Something in your films seems to come very close to that territory. Part of what makes your films so literary, so novelistic, is their subtlety, and the peril of subtlety is that it needs corresponding subtlety in the watcher or reader. I suppose the danger is of not being intricately, properly understood.

I think what hurts is often the encounter with capitalism and all its tangents, in the sense that you’re making something that’s deeply personal, and then it arrives and it becomes a commodity, and that’s by nature painful. Specifically, it’s like encountering two bodies—you have the critical body and you have the industry body, and both of them can hurt you and also make your future less certain as an artist. That’s what you encounter as you release something into the audience and into the world.

I have such reverence for the novel, and I appreciate you seeing in the work an aesthetic that is maybe grounded in the novel, because I would say my education as an

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artist began with the novel. The novel has been more important to me than any other art form—particularly when I was really young. But I’m always interested in how I fail to achieve certain things that a novel can do and that writers do.

I could talk about failure, but I do think there are ways that movie making is like writing, especially the ways in which silence and space and cinematic movement can create paragraphs, or what I consider paragraphs. So, there isn’t just text and there isn’t just subtext. There’s also language in the image and in ambiguity. I try to preserve the ambiguous in particular.

To me, the killer blow of that defense, of that distinction between the two forms, is that the hardest thing to achieve in writing any kind of semblance of objectivity, and to create something that doesn’t feel like the sordid little thing that you just sort of came up with all on your own, and you’re pretending that these people exist, and you’re pretending they’re saying this, that, and the other and they’re doing things to each other. The glory of what you’re doing is that your fingerprints aren’t all over it, and one can actually suspend disbelief, be in that created world without feeling manipulated and without feeling that actually you’ve somehow been conscripted into an author’s subjectivity.

An author’s plot, not just the plot of the story, but the plot of living. I reduce that in practice to: never point.

Your actors are not allowed to point, or you don’t point?

My actors would have a hard time pointing because we don’t talk about meaning. I try to avoid talking about meaning. And I think that’s something that I have been encouraged by Passages to refine even more, which is to avoid meaning. I think what you’re saying about subtlety is also about associative understandings of people and story. I’m naturally associative, so I think my conversations are associative. I think my eye is associative. And, for me, it’s like the quality of the film is based on how precise but open those associations are for myself and the audience.

Let’s talk about Love is Strange. Watching it made me realize how thin of meaning most contemporary cinema is. You show the ways in which people love or are warm to or are considered to be having meaningful relationships with others, as a form of not selfishness exactly, but a kind of self-adornment or self-love. So, you give us the situation where apparently there’s this wonderful group of supportive friends who are celebrating this couple, but actually, when they have to help them, their moral dysfunction is pitilessly exposed. And that film is a film that has a plan. It really does. And it very much takes you by surprise. It’s a level of satire that one is not used to experiencing in cinema.

I think that, in some ways, these things are connected: the moral flaw and the artistic flaw. If you were using pop terminology, you’d say it’s a form of imposter syndrome, but to me, it’s also really trying to be human and understand that humans have limits because of need and fear. In all my films generally, people do something that they really would say to themselves they

shouldn’t do, right? I think the difference when I think about your work and my work, and possibly why we met because I was interested in adapting your book Outline and felt I had nothing to add, it was a complete experience that I would only make less of in cinema, is that I do think the feature film is more like an O. Henry kind of work, a different space than the novel.

I’m not sure I quite know what an O. Henry space is, because I’m English.

Oh, it’s like a little fable in which something turns in a moment that changes everything unexpectedly. A short story.

So, it’s actually what novelists are trying not to do but cinema-makers should do a lot more of.

What I’m saying is I’m my own character. I both know what is good about me and I also know what is bad about me, or I’m trying to figure that out. And I’ve been in therapy with my psychoanalyst—

Which we’re allowed to talk about.

Of course. It’s not a 12-step program. We can talk about it. I find that I keep—now this is going down a rabbit hole—but I keep struggling with my desire to control myself as a character in other people’s eyes. I want to be able to see everything you see about me and spot it before you do or before you pretend you don’t. So, if you see a flaw, I want to see it first.

But the flaw is identity—or, rather, the limitation is identity. And you, like me,

are very careful about that: you know what is legitimate for you to observe and talk about, and you’re not going to start raiding other fields of experience. I find that a very unusual position in contemporary anglophone cinema. It’s unusual enough in literature as well. For me, this is the sort of red-hot problem: what one does, or I do, as a moral position, I guess, which is to keep very strictly within the bounds of— not autobiography but the self-terrain, what one is entitled to know and observe. I think that is the sort of tormenting point of shame or self-doubt, when in fact it is actually an artistic necessity for me and for you.

The difference is, I think by nature, that when you make cinema, you work with people other than yourself. I made an autobiographical film, where the character based on me was played by a Danish actor, who was not me. And if you’re Danish, you have a different experience, you have different siblings, you have different apartments, you have different rooms. And also, I’m building those rooms.

The challenge—and you hit the nail on the head because it’s exactly what I wake up worrying about when I think about new work—is how do I create worlds with which you believe that I am the most intimate.

I’m currently working on a film called Arthur Russell, set in New York in the late ’80s, which was a place I lived, in New York in the late ’80s. I’m close, but I have to create new versions of that. It’s why I sometimes wish I could be a documentary filmmaker, because then the real is there.

In a way, I’m only interested in the real. And real meaning to me is the intimate—I have to change real to intimate. So, capturing intimacy in a space and among a group of people is really important to me, capturing how we are in relation to other people, whether it be in a bedroom, or a nightclub, or a car, or a restaurant, each of those.

But the question is how do you create intimacy? How do you access the real? You work so much from self and self-experience that the real challenge is language. And, for me, it’s actually enactment.

There’s another challenge: a person reading my books or watching your films can say, “They don’t include all these other identities and experiences.” The very thing, the very restraint one exercises, in some people’s eyes looks like exclusion or narrowness. For me, that’s the wakeup-every-day problem, because I think I’ve created my work by continuously finding what is radical in my identity, but that is a thread that has to be picked out very painstakingly every time, because it’s extremely easy to miss it and to get it wrong.

It also changes because, sometimes, there is no good answer, and other times, the answer is, “Okay, my experiences are running across a broad swathe of universality here.” So, sometimes there is a radicalness to my voice, and at other times, that isn’t true, or I lose it.

For you, what is the distinction between autobiography and observation? To take it one step further, what does your identity entitle you to observe? Is it sex between

men? Do you have that same experience of a radical thing in your identity that needs to be tended to? A flame that needs to be protected?

What comes to my mind are certain moments in my work where I’ve succeeded, and certain moments where I’ve failed, at understanding others who are not me. I made a film called The Delta, my first feature. I spent so much time with this young African-American Vietnamese immigrant, who stars in the film. I spent so many months in his world, and I think that helped me get some things right in my depiction. There’s a sense of authenticity of place and community.

Then I look at a scene in Love is Strange where I imagine an apartment where a Latin man lives with his boyfriend, and I realize that I didn’t get it right that time, I kind of made it up. I can feel the difference. So, to me, what you’re asking has so much to do with practice.

For this East Village film set in 1980s New York, I just need to spend the next year going out a lot. I need to be in clubs. I need to see people perform, because that’s in my movie. I need to do the work of the documentarian in order to create the work of a fiction filmmaker.

That sounds a lot more fun than writing a novel.

Well, it’s a lot more fun, but you still have to do the work. So, in Passages, for example, there are two scenes in the workplace of the Ben Whishaw character. I think I actually got it right in the film. I think you

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believe that’s his job and his workplace and you believe what you’re seeing. And I did that just by spending an afternoon there with my iPhone recording a person actually doing this job, and using the exact dialogue from those moments. We also cast the people who came through the office space. These people are playing themselves.

Doesn’t that make it more fake rather than more real? But also, does it matter if things are a bit fake?

If they’re a bit fake, they can also be shallow, and I’m trying to avoid that. In a novel or in a film, you’re only giving a certain amount of information. You’re rendering certain things that either make it more real or more fake. But real doesn’t mean realistic. It means something else, right?

It’s funny how narrative artworks behave in time. Now, when you watch an old black and white movie where two people are sitting in a car, and you know the background was shot in a studio, the trick is very obvious. And also, the content is distilled by that consciousness of fakery, so that it almost becomes more—the dramatic art is enlarged by the feeling of the scenery and the cardboard scenery, if you see what I mean.

Yeah, but these are very different kinds of works. I’m working in a realistic style. There is a history of realism that I am engaged with, which has to do with something very different than rear projection. So, you’re talking about the fact that the entirety of the language for certain artists is different based on period, based on taste.

I mean, Fassbinder isn’t real, but it’s real.

Do you feel of your time? Just to consider the question of influence—

I do, but I feel like, as I imagine for any artist, my time contains the history of my medium. So, I mean, my influences tend to be between 1978 and 1982, weirdly. If I look at a film and I’m like, well, that film, I just need to study and be with it and think about it, it almost always is ’77 to ’84, let’s say. In that way, I’m a little bit out of my time. But that time seems pretty recent to me because the movies that I love don’t age.

I wanted to talk about actors and character. Your movie Forty Shades of Blue continues to have the most haunting effect on me. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I probably think about that film every couple of days, because of its portrayal of womanhood and femininity. Part of that is the actor, but the director is the unseen hand in this. You conceive of your films and you conceive of these characters so your actors enact, to an extraordinary level of sophistication, something that seems to be partly theirs and partly yours. How do you get this out of the people you’re working with?

I think about film being non-narrative and having the impact of a painting, like you could actually remember it as a whole, as if it exists at once. That’s a good direction for how to make a movie: what is the emotional and visual impact that will linger, or that might linger? That gives me a sense that maybe I can make a few mistakes when it comes to authenticity, but if I make something that has power, it doesn’t matter. The viewer might not remember

the moments of falseness.

That was my point about things being fake not mattering, because at its best, visual media presents something that’s eternally recurring. There’s a lot of that in Passages as well, these scenes are always happening, like a visual artwork, a painting that is happening in the now and has an eternal character. That seems to be something that you and a few other, a very few other, great filmmakers can do.

I think the advantage the filmmaker has over the novelist is that the actor writes so many paragraphs that I could never write. They do that because I’ve set up the factory or the possibility or the opportunity. And I’ve set that up not just by casting but by the image, by everything that goes into the moment that the actor acts. But then, I’m also suddenly an observer of another artist.

There’s this beautiful moment in Forty Shades of Blue when Dina Korzun walks across the living room with a glass of white wine. I remember being in the room when we shot that, and she was moving like a robot. There was nothing real about what she was doing in that moment. And I was just experiencing a form of joy because the real and the unreal were coming together through her.

For filmmakers, collaboration is part of the artform, and it’s very different for novelists. In a way, that’s what’s happening right here in this interview: the pleasure of what you give me and I give you and you give me and I give you. And ultimately, that makes something that we hope is compelling and interesting and has moments of

beauty. In a way, that’s my talent, or at least, the talent I’m the most comfortable with and the most confident about—my ability to see originality and beauty and detail in what other people create. I’m a creator, but also, other people are part of my creation. With actors specifically, I try to give them a sense that they’re being watched and that they can trust to be free, but I try not to talk very much.

It’s notable for me, especially in Forty Shades of Blue, that you provide a situation in which the actor reconnects with the experience of living. They recognize something so true that they actually ignite and are living. They’re not acting, they’re living. And I think the best you can hope for as a writer is that there are certain passages in your work where the reader stops reading and is living, is actively becoming something, participating in whatever sort of magic it is that descends at these moments, when there’s a different kind of contact with life and with truth.

I think that what you’re describing is beautiful and an interesting way to think about reading. I’m imagining it’s not your strategy as a writer. That is something you can think about not in the process but in the consideration.

It almost just happens—when you’re writing, moments take flight in some way you can feel, where it feels like something coming to you from outside yourself. One assumes that those are exactly the same places where the reader can also have that experience.

I think that what happens in film is

moments of joy when everything seems to happen and it seems like in fact nothing is happening but what’s in front of you. And I remember there were moments of actual joy in the creation of Passages, which also, by the way, can be really rare in directing, which is usually one minute of anxiety after the next. It’s almost traumatic because you are actually trying to corral the un-corral-able and turn it into something very specific. It’s very hard, I have to say.

We haven’t spoken about the script, which is, of course, really, really significant. I’ve worked with Mauricio Zacharias as my co-writer on five films, and I have to say that the script gives you a kind of… I think of it as the coat rack. Let’s just use that word. The script is the coat rack.

Right.

The moment I’m describing in Forty Shades of Blue, the script is what makes it so meaningful: the story, consequence, suspense. I have traditional narrative goals in my work.

It makes me think of the discipline and classicism of that kind of storytelling and the risk of people not giving it enough time, not giving it enough of their attention in order to understand what you’re actually doing.

I have what I call my “monsters”: Maurice Pialat, Jean Eustache, Yasujirō Ozu, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Henry James makes you believe that everything has to have value. Every detail has to have narrative value. There isn’t a stray line in

Henry James that doesn’t move forward some part of the narrative. Maybe not the plot, but the narrative. Maybe that’s why I’ve had such a hard time with his last few books. I’ve never read The Ambassadors, for example, because there’s less of an interest in narrative tension. And I tend to like a book that has story.

This isn’t what most people go to Henry James for, but in fact, when I say your films are novelistic, I mean they’re Jamesian.

There’s a wonderful essay by, is it Elizabeth Hardwick, where she really finds fault with James for establishing almost a system of capitalism, portraying people by ascribing an almost monetary value to self and others, to living, to social transactions. It’s almost like capitalism in its totality and in its control of the most intimate parts of experience. Hardwick tracks that down to what she sees as an immoral use of language, particularly around the class differences between characters. She catches him out, in his endless weighing of humans as part of a capitalistic system.

I would be interested in what she would make of Trollope, who is even more extensive in that way. I love when people poke holes in your monsters because then you see them as human. And even if you disagree, it’s liberating.

I had that with Cassavetes when someone once said to me, there’s so much acting in his movies. It’s all acting. At first I was like, “Ah,” but I now consider it kind of perfect. It’s all acting. That’s great. But it’s nice to see even the duality of your greats, and the fallibility of your greats, though I don’t

really see it with Henry James. It would be hard to find. In a way, Hardwick’s problem with James is exactly what I think is fundamental to the drama of my films: capitalism and economics. The character cannot be separated from money.

Let’s turn to sex in your films, which seems to be outside the economic system. There’s something about the indelibility of the act, and the fact that I suppose its indelibility arises from the surrender of individuality. It’s a situation in which people are no longer in control in this morally capitalistic way that we’ve been talking about.

I’ve really wondered about filming sex scenes: the camera, the voyeurism of the camera, the fake-make-believe. You come perilously close to a Wizard of Oz presence. You’re projecting this and designing it. Those scenes in particular make me realize that you have a very unusual presence in your films.

I think what comes to mind is we are bodies. And there are moments in which the physicality of life becomes dominant. As you said, two men having sex with each other is an experience that I can access because of my identity, but in all my movies I’m really trying to understand the animal nature of human beings, both in terms of their desires and in terms of their bodies.

Also, I really do identify as a man. And I think in some ways, your novels seem to me grounded in that they are written by you as a woman. And so, before I become a gay man, I’m a man. And part of what that

voyeurism is about is power. There’s a lot of power in it, right?

Yes.

Part of what those scenes do is create the visual and emotional impact we discussed earlier. Impact is like resonance. It’s the residue of the film, which is calculated. This scene will be longer than other scenes. This shot will be longer than other shots. And so, then it becomes like the poetry of the film.

I’ve just been reading in French and translating, myself, Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, and he talks a lot about corporeality. In the end he says, “My body is the proof.” It’s the proof that I’m going to die, and that God doesn’t exist. Your sex scenes, if I had to describe them in a phrase or an utterance—if they were an utterance—it would be something like, “This is all there is.” There’s just watching, and watching these bodies do this. They anchor the films in mortality, which then makes caring about living so complex.

For me, one of the things that death allows is the encouragement to take risks because it allows me to be certain what is there to lose. I think, in order to continue, I have to tell myself, what is there to lose?

What is there?

I think that’s the end.

I think that’s the end. That’s a good ending. Oh, lord.

Well, we’re both writers.

Bettina

Detail of Phenomenological New York (1970s)

C-prints (printed and mounted by Bettina) 26 × 23 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

JUNK AND UNDERWEAR

Fabrication and

factography

in Soviet Union literature

by Wendi Bootes

Nothing is more reliable and less vulnerable to emotional bias than cold, hard facts. This notion—that facts are the bulwark against partiality—is such an unquestioned commonplace that it appears to hardly merit mention. Indeed, our trust in their absolute authority leads historian of science Lorraine Daston to liken our modern understanding of facts to rocks, those “angular,” obstinate, brutish things. Loyal to no one, they are the “mercenary soldiers of argument.” One can, by this line of reasoning, enlist a stony fact to combat the distortions of bias and subjectivity, or hurl its sturdy matter at the stuff of mere opinion and watch the fragile glass of illusion shatter.

Yet the idea that facts are as durable and ubiquitous as geological formations is ironically a strikingly recent one. The current reputation of facts as trusty stewards of objectivity has not always been so assured: the reality is that facts have their own history, language, and development. It might be helpful to recall the etymology of the word—from the Latin factum, meaning an act (or even a crime)—which will likely come as a bit of a shock to those accustomed to viewing facts as the stable anchors of our world.

In excavating the historical bedrock of factuality, we find useful—if perhaps unexpected—companions among writers, artists, and theorists of the early Soviet Union, for whom the vitality and contingency of facts was acutely felt. Such considerations animated a vibrant and lesser-known moment in early Soviet culture: an experimental movement known as factography, or “literatura fakta,” which emerged out of the heady atmosphere of political and aesthetic debates over postrevolutionary representation. The 1920s were a hotbed of innovation in documentation, as experiments in film, photography, radio, and newspaper reporting accompanied a veritable eruption in novel media technologies. Artists—ranging from writers to photographers and filmmakers—sought to portray the lived effects of rapid industrialization, agricultural collectivization, and the attempted spread of socialist revolution: in short, the building of the new Soviet state.

Montage, one of the most notable documentary practices to come out of this era, embraced techniques that demonstrated a keen attunement to the oscillating dynamic between the deconstruction of documentary materials (such as newsreel

footage) and their reconstruction as intentionally formed objects. As Elizabeth Papazian notes, the “desire for concrete facts” remained a persistent, if also evolving, fixation throughout the first decade of the USSR. Indeed, Lenin himself explicitly voiced this impulse in an early Pravda article from 1918 on the Soviet press, in which he demands, in no uncertain terms, “more documentation” (proverka). Echoing this sentiment, prominent documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov proffered the vivid phrase “fabrika faktov” (factory of facts) to describe his cinematic work. His eponymous manifesto includes some delightfully illustrative phrasing: “Fists made of facts. Lightning bolts of facts! Mountains of facts. Hurricanes of facts. And separate little factlets.” Facts, in short, were suddenly everywhere.

An avant-garde movement, factography hatched out of this broader documentary culture. But at the same time, some factographic practitioners (known as faktoviki), including the polymathic Sergei Tretiakov, cast a critical eye at the promise and possibility of authentic, purely “objective” documentation. They questioned the constructed nature of the concept of objectivity, as an idea historically defined by the ruling classes and so purportedly aligned with a bourgeois perspective—one certainly not comprising working or colonized peoples. “Literature of fact” challenged claims to singular objectivity by emphasizing the communal process of production, incorporating a combination of journalistic reportage, interviews, and storytelling. Gone was the lone perspective of the “genius” artist; for Tretiakov, the collectively authored newspaper was the new epic. The Tolstoys of the world were rendered obsolete when

faced with what he called the “collective brain of the revolution.”

To be sure, “literature of fact” proved more of a tendency or praxis than a fixed genre, which for its practitioners functioned to connect art and life. This praxis aimed not only for mass accessibility but also for mass political transformation via the provision of reported facts. It emphasized exterior, tangible data in place of interior, psychological details, which were seen as obsolete relics of earlier bourgeois literary forms. As the faktoviki organized brigades of writers to observe and depict proletarian sites such as kolkhozes and factories, they insisted that selectively chosen descriptions from the recently industrialized environment—presented alongside an array of new media, including photography and the cinema—could actively intervene in social life, and foment socialist consciousness, by expressing certain material qualities of social and historical reality. In this way, description could prove politically transformative. And so, even as factographic works were invested in a kind of representation, their primary emphasis remained on dynamic creation—a mediated kind of authenticity—rather than “mere” reflection. Not objectivity, exactly, but a concept Tretiakov termed “operativnost” (operativity).

It’s likely clear by now that several stubborn tensions reside at the heart of factography’s ambitions, ones that reflect the contradictory status of facts as obdurate, stable givens and the pliable creations of human beings. Even as these practices dismiss fictional narratives in favor of referentially truthful material, they aim to rouse the reader’s (or viewer’s) political consciousness by way of a thoughtful

reconstruction of factual elements, a process that necessarily involves the effortful construction of “truth.” For factography, and documentary practices more broadly, our faculties of perception are both our primary means of access to the world and an errant guide. Simultaneously a tool of empowerment and deeply vulnerable to manipulation, perception is the fickle basis by which documentary materials are assembled and consumed. And within this economy of artistic production, not all facts or fragments are equally valuable, nor are they transparently accessible to the untrained eye. The “factlets” in question, to borrow Vertov’s cheeky coinage, possess an edifying, consciousness-raising value, leveraged to an end at odds with an ostensibly passive presentation of the world.

How to yoke together these two apparently contradictory impulses? How can one construct an organic and unified collection of facts without imposing an artificial narrative, that format almost universally associated with fiction? One through line that emerges in factographic works is the importance of vantage point or perspective (tochka zreniya). Or rather, perspectives plural: different points of view, amassed from the “collective brain of the revolution,” offer a more comprehensive and authentic accounting when toeing the fragile line between “straight” facts and “narrative.” It is an aspirational objectivity that relies, rather paradoxically, on an accumulation of subjective experiences.

•

It was into this turbulent literary and artistic landscape that a provocative collection of sketches emerged depicting the PolishSoviet war of 1919–21, a conflict spinning

out of the Russian Revolution that is largely forgotten today. The author was the multi-hyphenate Russian-UkrainianJewish-Soviet Isaac Babel, and his stories, published sporadically in leftist journals starting in 1923, were eventually compiled in 1926 under the title Konarmiia (Red Cavalry) Babel’s sketches were received by some as nothing short of scandalous, owing to the fact that they were initially purported to be “news” from the front lines (Babel was indeed a war correspondent for the Red Cavalry, and did travel into combat). One of the most seething attacks was issued by the military commander of the Red Cavalry himself, Semyon Budyonny, who fumed that Babel had fabricated “irresponsible fairy tales” (bezotvetstvennyye nebylitsy) that focused only on “junk and underwear” (barakhle-bel’ye) instead of the main, heroic actions of the First Cavalry Army.

It’s true that Babel’s stories comprise a curious blend of testimony and fiction. Many of Babel’s contemporaries and early readers—including Budyonny—understood the stories to be earnestly autobiographical, and so open to charges of libel. The sketches are largely based on material from Babel’s wartime diaries, and they do feature actual historical figures, battles, quotes from newspapers and political speeches, and references to historical details of the Soviet offensive in Poland. The early promotion of their factual status might be less troublesome if it were merely a question of misplaced emphasis—depicting the mess at the rear rather than the “true” action at the front, in Budyonny’s framing. But—and this is where things get even trickier—the collection also incorporates blatant falsehoods. Liutov,

Babel’s primary narrator (a bespectacled Jewish intellectual who bears an uncanny resemblance to the author), reroutes rivers, scrambles dates, and shuffles villages. This troubled relationship to the historical record, in addition to the sketches’ often ornate interludes, unreliable narrators, and penchant for exaggerated metaphorizing, has contributed to a volte-face in regard to their accepted generic status. In vivid contrast to the early reception of Red Cavalry, criticism of the last few decades almost exclusively refers to the cycle as fictional. Coming down firmly on one side or the other, however, is beside the point. What if, instead, we see Babel’s work as an invitation to confront the uncomfortable coexistence of facts and fictions, to acknowledge the manufactured and often selective nature of factuality? Mining his stories for factual representations is an exercise in futility—they wouldn’t pass muster with any fact-checker—because their interest lies beyond the idea of singular truth. But if facts are, at least in some sense, made, then the sketches are indeed a chronicle of the often contradictory “facts” of everyday experience, the softer stuff of perceptions and misperceptions, jumbled together in the chaos and confusion of war. In one story, simply titled “Pis’mo” (“A Letter”), the dictated correspondence from a young soldier to his mother vacillates between describing the “grand style” of life in the cavalry and desperate pleas for provisions. It’s a case study in contrast, as the young man switches rapidly between dialect and bureaucratese, formal and informal modes of address, and conflicting accounts of the cavalry’s exploits. The culminating event of the letter, the execution of his father, is notably omitted: “Semyon Timofeyich

sent me out of the yard so I can’t describe to you, dearest Mama Evdokia Fyodorovna, how they finished Papa.”

The inability to describe the “main event” is one of the collection’s primary concerns, even as it offers a plentitude of descriptions of “lesser” moments: quarrels over horses, detailed accounts of desecrated churches, and interactions with the local peasantry (muzhiks). The sights, sounds, and smells of the postrevolutionary landscape generate a litany of atomized impressions, and the pages of Red Cavalry are filled with the scorched scent of villages, the cacophony of animals being slaughtered, and the sight of the earth wet with blood. In line with the Soviet documentarian emphasis on new, collective ways of seeing, these impressions come from multiple perspectives. The stories, which rely on a variety of different narrators, ventriloquize a host of peripheral characters through embedded tales and a heavy reliance on a Russian literary tradition called “skaz,” a kind of performed oral speech in narrative form, often of “lower” or more popular registers. Seen in this light, the accumulation of perceptions—imprecise, incomplete, and decisively on the margins—provides the kind of mass, experiential authenticity to which the faktoviki and Soviet documentarians aspired. Refracted through the prism of collective experiences, the “truth” of the Polish-Soviet war becomes a matter not of historical record but of abundant perceptual data. Far from the ideal of official, “hard” fact, these facts are distorted and partial. They come from below, from the sidelines, and from the literal margins of a recently collapsed empire.

For Babel, one of the most famous experimental prose writers of the early Soviet era, the literary avant-garde is necessarily— and paradoxically—located at the rear of the action: an arrière-garde, as it were. His emphasis on the assorted voices at the margins of war reverses the militaristic comparison that equates artistic innovation with the frontline viewpoint of a military vanguard unit. It’s a sustained performance of limited perception that, ultimately, offers a distorted version of facts in the service of a kind of perceptual truth.

The history of factography, and its place in the larger context of early Soviet documentary experimentation, tells us a lot about our expectations regarding truth and fact. The counterintuitive aspiration to objectivity via a mass of subjectivities suggests that these orientations are intimately related to, even dependent upon, one another. Babel’s generically rebellious collection, which depicts the violent aftermath of imperial collapse, compels us to reflect on our expectations of “straight” factuality under conditions of extreme deprivation and sudden political reorganization. What does it mean to be accurate in the context of radical upheaval and constantly shifting political categories (national borders, governments, populations)? What is knowable—and describable—in the face of such catastrophes? Indeed, the unstable and contested borders of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia in the postrevolutionary period suggest that Babel’s own fugitive geography—his tendency to mislabel, misdate, rearrange, and invent—is ironically authentic in conveying an overwhelming sense of terrestrial instability. It’s a volatility that is

unfortunately no less relevant today, as the landscape of Eastern Ukraine is once again transformed under the violence of Russian territorial claims contesting the nation’s sovereignty.

Rather than suggesting that factuality is impossible or irrelevant, Babel’s pseudodocumentary practice underscores the malleability of the very category of “fact.” The Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum praised Babel’s tendency to “exaggerate details and violate the normal proportions of the world” as central to his literary craft. Yet this elevation of peripheral perspectives and “minor” incidents also invites a recognition of the social and historical conditions that determine how—and which—facts are mobilized in particular moments, and by whom. And it turns out that a collection of partially true, partially false stories penned by an Odessan raconteur a century ago reveals just this historical changeability: the fluctuating fault lines separating ideas of truth, as a kind of authentic empirical experience, from ideals of fact, which rest on mutable assumptions of isolated objectivity. The concluding story in Red Cavalry sees Liutov gathering the scattered belongings of a fellow Jewish revolutionary, noting that “everything was dumped together here”: personal effects mix with revolver cartridges and official Communist leaflets, whose margins are scrawled full of Hebrew verses. In a culminating illustration of incongruity and (literal) marginality, Babel urges us to consider if perhaps “junk and underwear” is precisely the point.

Bettina Untitled (1960s) Ink on paper

19 1/8 × 19 1/8 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

TRAVEL SARAH

by Jean Chen Ho

At some point in our thirties, I made it a rule to never travel with Sarah. Because she worked such long hours, Sarah wanted maximum fun on vacation: over-the-top partying, the opportunity to totally sever herself from the stress of her daily life. I called this persona “Travel Sarah.” This version of my best friend was pure glorious id, all Dionysian chaos in wedge heels and meticulous eye makeup.

Travel Sarah did whatever she wanted, on her own timeline, regardless of how it affected the group. If there was a set itinerary—dinner reservations, a show to catch—Sarah was late for it. At meals, if we discussed appetizers and mains to share family-style, negotiating food preferences for ease of splitting the bill, Sarah insisted on her own entrée and a glass of the most expensive wine on the menu; the moderately priced bottle everyone else had agreed on just wouldn’t do. Even the way she took up space in the hotel room, as if her suitcase had exploded upon arrival, irritated me to no end.

I never confronted “regular” Sarah about Travel Sarah. What was the point? I didn’t see her changing, and I understood that she saw these girls’ trips—five of us, friends since high school—as a time to assert her own desires for once, as respite from the drudgery of taking orders from her celebrity boss. For many years, Sarah worked as Ben Stiller’s personal assistant. She had to be perfect at work, I imagined—no mistakes allowed, everything double-checked and triple-confirmed. She had to always be thinking two steps ahead, anticipating various contingency plans in case anything went awry.

Travel Sarah, on the other hand, was free to do as she pleased, footloose and fancy-free. In a tiny, deeply recessed part of my brain, I might even have been happy for her. I loved her, after all. She was one of my oldest friends, like a sister to me. Family. But mostly, I couldn’t stand being around Travel Sarah.

After another trip I’d silently suffered through with her, a bachelorette party in Vegas for one of the other women in the friend group, I vowed I’d never do it again.

The last straw was a cab ride from our hotel to the Chippendales show. We were late, cutting it close to the starting time, because Sarah was the last one to come down to the lobby. “Sorry, sorry,” she’d murmured. “Where were you? What happened?” someone asked. She said she was trying on dresses at the Hervé L éger boutique because she didn’t like anything she’d brought with her, and lost track of the time.

The energy of the group was already against her, and perhaps, feeling this tacit reprisal, she volunteered to sit up front in the passenger seat. The rest of us climbed into the back of the van. The air-conditioning was busted, and Sarah demanded a discount; it started off as a joke, I believe, a kind of friendly provocation that bordered on flirtation. The driver, however, wasn’t amused. He responded defensively, raising his voice, and Sarah matched his tone, any sense of flirtation gone from the air, leaving only an escalating hostility. The exchange ended suddenly when the driver turned up the radio to a volume that precluded any further conversation. He began to drive erratically, weaving fast between cars on the freeway. He meant to scare us, I think, and it wasn’t ineffective. I clutched my seat belt and silently cursed Travel Sarah. I promised myself that this was the last time I’d tolerate a vacation with her.

•

Sarah and I met in the eighth grade and became fast friends, sharing clothes and cigarettes all through high school. In our twenties, we’d both lived in New York. I wrote grants at a nonprofit while secretly working on a novel at night. Sarah was leashed to her job at all hours of the day, by BlackBerry and iPhone. I moved back

to L.A. after three years; she stayed for more than a decade. Sarah had a fourthfloor walk-up in the West Village with a roommate, then a light-filled, spacious studio by herself in Tribeca. Her last place was in a doorman building in Williamsburg. It seemed she was rarely at home, though. She traveled wherever Stiller’s projects brought him, on set for weeks, months: London, Vancouver, Atlanta, Hawaii. We texted and emailed irregularly after I moved out of New York; I couldn’t keep track of her whereabouts. We rarely talked on the phone, preferring to catch up in person when she was home for the holidays, or if work brought her back to California for short periods.

I knew Sarah dreamed of moving up from her assistant tasks to a role with greater creative responsibilities in Stiller’s production company. She wanted a hand in developing his film projects, wanted to work with writers. She’d threatened to quit countless times, but he always convinced her to stay on. The promotion never materialized.

She finally left the job and, for a while, tried other things: she produced a couple of indie shorts with a director friend; then there was talk of opening up a fitness studio with her trainer; later on, she gave me a bunch of creams and serums to try out for the comprehensive Asian skincare website she was excited to get off the ground. None of these ideas quite stuck. She’d reached out to her Hollywood network and sent off her résumé for openings, she told me, but no one was calling back—before Stiller, she’d worked for the Weinstein Company, on Harvey’s team of assistants. And in 2018, no one wanted to hire someone who’d once been affiliated with him, she said.

Sarah moved back in with her parents in California. She still had the apartment in Brooklyn, and all the furniture. With no income, she was forced to sublet it, optimistic that she’d land back on her feet soon enough.

Then, a global pandemic happened.

The friend group Sarah and I shared kept in touch through daily texts, and monthly Zoom sessions. When she signed in to those virtual “happy hours” in 2020, I recognized her old bedroom from high school, furnished differently now: large flat-screen TV against one wall, a queensize bed in place of the cozy twin on which I’d lounged for hours on end, when we were teenage girls. Seeing that room in her parents’ house through my computer screen filled me with nostalgia for the years of our messy, misguided youth. Memories swam back to me: how we used to get ready together for house party kickbacks and school formals, the first time I got high off a joint from her small-time drug dealer neighbor and we lay side by side on her bed, laughing at nothing, and everything.

When vaccines became available in the spring of 2021, the friend group started making plans for a girls’ trip. After a year in quarantine, I was excited to get on a plane and see my friends, all together again, in person. I set aside my previous rule about never traveling with Sarah. Here was a chance to reset, I thought. Start over. If I’d learned anything in those despairing months, alone in my apartment, it was that I had taken Sarah’s friendship for granted. Recalling all those incidents from before, my exasperation with Travel Sarah felt petty. Why did I have so little

patience with her? Perhaps it was a function of our long-standing friendship, the capacious luxury of having had so much time together and the expectation of more time—the rest of our lives—as friends.

•

In August that year, Sarah took her own life. The last emails we’d exchanged were about the girls’ trip to New Orleans. Sarah had been enthusiastic in our thread: “I’m in!!!!!!!!!!!”

In some ways, Sarah’s suicide wasn’t a surprise to me. I knew she’d lived with depression and anxiety. There had been a previous attempt, years ago. Her mental health was something we’d always talked around, never addressed straight on; I feared offending her in some way, of saying the wrong thing that might make her feel more isolated or, worse, pitied. I never felt pity for her, but I was sad, often, after spending time with her. I wanted Sarah to see that she was valuable.

Still, the news of her suicide was a shock to the system, a complete undoing of reality. Losing her is unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. For a time, I thought: Nothing can hurt me now, and nothing can hurt me ever again. My grief was a shield against the world and everything ugly in it. The worst had happened. And somehow, I was alive. The intensity of feeling in those days immediately after her death reminded me of the sensation of being in love, every cell in my body pulsing with desire: the desire to see her again.

•

A week or so after the funeral, I went to visit Sarah’s parents. Neither of them had attended the funeral. Her dad didn’t come

downstairs, but Sarah’s mom and I sat together for a while in the living room. The grand piano covered with a protective white lace shroud, the formal walnut dining set just behind it. And the stairs that led up to Sarah’s old room. I don’t remember what we talked about. What was there to say? Her mother and I both cried a little, and probably shared some of our memories of her.

Right before I left, her mother said: “It feels like Sarah’s just gone away, on a trip.”

In my life, Sarah was always leaving and returning, then leaving again: the demands of her job; the accepted rhythm of our long friendship, its ebbs and flows of distance, intimacy. Her mother told me that Sarah had taken an Uber to a hotel that night. She said she’d watched the home security footage of Sarah getting into the car, pulling away from the house. “Just like any other time, traveling somewhere for work, or going back to New York,” her mother said. “And then I think, she’ll be back soon.”

John Berger wrote: “The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In this core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness.” This made me think of two things. One: The dead are always here with us. They do indeed surround us, don’t they? I believe they do. And yet they do not approach us. The dead cannot travel to us; we, the living, must go to them. We do this as an aesthetic practice, as one-time ceremony or as ritual, meeting our dead in a designated place—at the cemetery, or by spreading their remains in a favorite spot; or we do it by traveling through time, as when we remember our dead, or by imagining a new relationship

with them in the future perfect of our grief. And two: If Sarah, my oldest friend, my sister, exists now and forever in that Bergerian timelessness that surrounds the core of the living, then she’ll never have to worry about being late, ever again. The dead are always perfectly on time. Travel in peace, Sarah.

I HAD BECOME THE TARGET

On Taylor Swift and the power of revisionism

by Claire Shaffer

To her droves of fans, Taylor Swift has always blurred the line between storyteller and historian. Despite being insanely famous for the better part of two decades, Swift’s greatest strength as a songwriter is her ability to twist the already-scrutinized details of her celebrity life and relationships into universal fairy-tale parables. A chance encounter with her popular musician ex backstage at an awards show becomes an awkward night of “standing alone in a crowded room” (“The Story of Us”). An unspecified betrayal from a Victoria’s Secret model becomes “the words of a sister [that] come back in whispers” (“it’s time to go”)—a formulation as readily

applicable to locker-room gossip as to potentially losing the rights over your masters to Scooter Braun. I should say “allegedly” in front of all of these examples, because Swift rarely, if ever, mentions her muses by name.

Knowing the intricacies of Swift’s personal life is not a prerequisite to enjoying her music; not every listener who has contributed to her pop-cultural dominance knows about “Bleachella,” or that photo on the boat with the blue dress. Yet the real-life inspiration behind her songs—the “lore,” as Swifties call it—has been nearly as central to her most obsessive fans’ fixations as the records themselves. Swift knows it; her team knows it; the NFL knows it now too. She billed her ludicrously profitable new arena show, the Eras Tour, as a threehour career retrospective drenched in spectacle. This makes perfect sense, as Swift has good reason to use the tour to heavily promote all 10 of her studio albums: her latest release, Midnights (2022); the three prior LPs she couldn’t tour because of the COVID-19 pandemic; and the remaining six, which Swift is now in the process of rerecording and rereleasing after her former label, Big Machine Records, sold their masters to Braun in 2019.

Swift has painted the rerecordings as a project she was initially reluctant to take on, even if it would mean regaining full legal control of her music. (As a songwriter, Swift retains the publishing rights on her first six albums.) “I’d run into Kelly Clarkson and she would go, ‘Just redo it,’” she told Time in December, when the magazine named her 2023’s Person of the Year. “My dad kept saying it to me too. I’d look at them and go, ‘How can I possibly do that?’ Nobody wants to redo their homework

if on the way to school, the wind blows your book report away.” (The high school metaphors never end.) Nevertheless, these rerecordings have provided Swift with a unique opportunity to revisit not only old songs but also her public image at the time they were released. It’s inevitable that each “Taylor’s Version”—the suffix given to the rerecorded albums/songs—has prompted a retrospective discussion of the album’s actual content, whether it be about the enduring strength of Swift’s songwriting, the improvement in her vocals, or the subtle yet controversial changes made to each track’s production. What has been less predictable (and honestly, more of a selling point for these albums) is how each has offered up a postmortem on that exact point in Swift’s career, a reexamination initiated, narrated, and presented entirely by Swift herself.

This comes in part through the rerecordings’ “vault tracks,” songs that were ostensibly written during the original album’s production but left on the cutting room floor. Most of these songs were never known to the public prior to Swift recording them for the new albums, except for one: “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault).” When it was announced for the 2021 rerecording of Red (2012), Swifties both laughed at the title and jumped for joy, as it meant the world was finally getting the fabled “original” extended cut of a track considered by fans and critics alike to be one of Swift’s best.

Since it first appeared on Red over a decade ago and organically became a fan favorite despite never being a single, “All Too Well” has had its origin story told and retold over the years by Swift and Liz Rose,

her co-writer on the song. They’ve claimed that it stemmed from an impromptu jam session between Swift and her band on tour, while she was going through a particularly painful breakup; Swift’s mom asked the sound guy, who happened to be recording the rehearsal on CD, to give her a copy. Rose then helped Swift pare the track down from a protracted airing of grievances—described as 10, 12, 15, or even 20 minutes long, depending on the exact interview—into its five-and-a-half minute studio version. Like the other vault tracks, we have no idea what “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” sounded like in its original form, as it was never released to the public. The track on Red (Taylor’s Version), recorded in 2020–21 like the rest of the album, is meant to be an approximation, at least lyrically, of what Swift’s unheard first draft may have been.

If this all sounds a little mythical, that is by design. For one, fans were already teased with excerpts from the original “All Too Well” cut before Red (Taylor’s Version): in another example of Swift monetizing her own archives, she included, in Targetexclusive editions of her 2019 album Lover, booklets of her own diary entries from ages 13 to 27, one of which contained a few scattered lines from the “All Too Well” demo. None of these lyrics appear in the 2021 rerecording. There’s also the now-infamous line about a “fuck the patriarchy” keychain that led a few skeptical listeners to think that Swift could not possibly have written it back in 2011. As Olivia Craighead argued in Gawker (in an article that, like the rest of the Gawker archives as of this writing, has been completely wiped from the internet), the phrase “fuck the patriarchy” did not reach cultural ubiquity until later

in the 2010s. Ben Zimmer at Slate even investigated the history of the phrase using Google Trends to determine when Swift may have first heard it.

But I think the definitive proof that “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” is an act of revisionism comes more simply, and requires no data analysis: the new portions of the song, particularly its ending, are far more retrospective than the freshwounded grief and anger found in the lyrics that first came out on Red: “I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age […] And did the twin flame bruise paint you blue? / Just between us, did the love affair maim you too?” To me, these lines read as emanating from someone who has had more than a few years to look back on a relationship— and who has also come to consider the age difference and subsequent power dynamics involved, which weren’t explicit in the “All Too Well” that first appeared on Red. Paired against the rawer lines from when the breakup was fresh (“Back before you lost the one real thing you’ve ever known”), it’s obvious which parts were written by the older Swift. And while there’s something compelling—even profound—in hearing an artist examine the same heartbreak from two very different stages of their life across one song, you almost have to ignore the officially spun backstory for “All Too Well” in order to gain that insight.

Swifties have a reputation for scrutinizing every last lyric and crafting extremely intricate timelines of Swift’s life, and quite a few have broken kayfabe to debate these discrepancies online. But by and large, “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” has been embraced as the definitive “director’s cut” of an already beloved record. It is the longest song to ever reach number one

on the Billboard Hot 100, and Swift’s performance of it on the Eras Tour is one of the show’s climactic moments. The “All Too Well” short film that accompanied the rerecording, which Swift directed, further mythologizes the real-life story behind the song, or at least how the public saw it—the film’s autumnal, plaid-clad aesthetic bears a striking resemblance to those maplelatte paparazzi shots of her and actor Jake Gyllenhaal. With each new detail that Swift shares about the song’s inception, there’s a greater dissonance between the song’s power as a raw, brutal parsing of heartbreak and the fantasy inherent in taking Swift entirely at her word.

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Art, even autobiographical art, is not factual recounting, though there is an outdated precedent of judging the work of female musicians as being necessarily more “personal” than most. It’s a restrictive and sexist perception that has historically boxed women artists into one mode of expression. What Swift has done, through her diaristic style of writing, is to expand her perception of the world outward, so that she becomes both the defining and the default viewpoint on her career. When 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was released this past fall, Swift included a prologue that reflected on the media’s public perception of her leading up to the album’s original release just nine years ago:

You see—in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut shaming—the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today. The jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The

trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath. The media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt.

None of what Swift is saying here is untrue. She was painted as a “serial dater” in tabloid articles and became the butt of late-night monologues for seeming to date a new actor, singer, or Kennedy every few months. Chelsea Handler called the frequency of men she dated “embarrassing”; an extended ribbing from Tina Fey and Amy Poehler when they hosted the 2013 Golden Globes led Swift to quote Madeleine Albright in a Vanity Fair interview: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” While maybe not as abhorrent as the public shaming of Britney Spears a few years (and one paradigm of celebrity culture) earlier, it’s clear with hindsight that Swift was treated unfairly by the press for exhibiting dating behavior pretty typical of someone in her late teens and early twenties. The obsession with whom she was partnered with and whom she might write a song about next—not to mention the assumption that she was “driving men away” through clinginess, or manipulating the romance for her songs—carried an ugly air of misogyny.

Still, I find “slut-shaming” to be a striking word choice. For as much as Swift was vilified by the media for her dating habits, she also went through great pains during this period of her career—the early 2010s, following the release of Red—to avoid sexualization. On the street and at press events, she was photographed in 1950s-inspired outfits or, as she later called

it, “housewife” fashion: polka-dot dresses, silk button-downs with plaid skirts, twee accessories. This was a popular style at the time—the era of ModCloth and New Girl (2011–18)—but also a trend that Swift deliberately chose over others. In her music, Swift wouldn’t swear or talk openly about drinking until 2017’s Reputation, released when she was 27. Even on 1989 (2014), references to sex were opaque and euphemistic (“The lights are off, he’s taking off his coat”), like the camera panning over to a window in a Hays Code–era film noir.

None of this prevents anyone from being slut-shamed, and I do believe that there was a streak of anti-promiscuity underlying much of the media fixation on Swift’s dating life (especially because it counteracted the “happily ever after” romances found in her earliest music). But hindsight is also 20/20: after spending much of the 2010s distancing herself from the “feminist” label, Swift’s framing of her treatment at this time is one of several recent gestures she’s made towards a larger feminist discourse. Much like how the new version of “All Too Well” places more emphasis on its age-gap relationship than the original, the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) prologue boils down her personal struggles during this time to a more general understanding of sexist treatment towards women. In an effort to appear more relatable, she flattens the nuance of what made the specific jabs against her so pernicious.

Swift actually had a peerless analysis of her public image at this time back on 1989 itself—in the lyrics of the song “Blank Space,” still one of her biggest singles to date, where she writes in the voice of the man-eating seductress the tabloids believed her to be. “That was the character

I felt the media had written for me, and for a long time I felt hurt by it,” Swift told GQ in 2015. “I took it personally. But as time went by, I realized it was kind of hilarious.”

The music video for “Blank Space,” filmed on a swanky Long Island estate, portrays Swift as a mad psychopath who “wears animal print, unironically.” She repeatedly gets into violent confrontations with her paramour, stabbing his portraits on the wall and beating up his Aston Martin with a golf club—before clinging to him, begging him to stay.

The satire was shrewd in two ways. First, by belittling the gossip rags’ perception of her, Swift reclaimed that characterization for her own gain. It is no longer a “gotcha” to call Swift calculating or savvy, largely because she has continued to co-opt this accusation into a compliment through songs like “Mastermind” and “Vigilante Shit” (both from Midnights). And second, though the heightened hysterics of the “Blank Space” video may suggest otherwise, she turned her conflict with the press into a universally legible take on how women are painted as crazy, conniving, or obsessive in their relationships with men.

There’s also a conundrum posed by these album rereleases and how Swift is retroactively framing each of their “eras,” because really, each album has two eras: the time during which it was written and recorded, and the promotional period shortly before and after it was released, when Swift based her entire aesthetic and media presence around its central thesis. In the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) prologue, Swift is referencing the former period, when she was writing songs for 1989 but still outwardly promoting and touring for Red. Yet “the 1989 era,” for most people

who remember it, conjures up images of her in the Anna Wintour bob, discussing her connection to ’80s pop music and, less charitably, becoming a cultural lightning rod in think piece after think piece about her group of friends known, temporarily, as “The Squad.” (And that’s to say nothing of the discourse that followed: a dispute with Nicki Minaj on Twitter that turned into a larger discussion about white feminism, her silence during the 2016 election, everything that happened with Kanye or Kim Kardashian.)

Defining these albums as products is to definitively link them to a specific point in time, delineating artificial “phases” in which Swift’s public image changed overnight, organizing history in a way life cannot be. Presumably, Swift will address her 2014–16 kerfuffles with Reputation (Taylor’s Version), as part of that album’s translation into the syntax of a new era.

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Righteousness is not the undercurrent of Swift’s rerecording project—it’s practically the entire point. Since the masters buyout in 2019, Braun has made his way into Swift’s lyrics as an unnamed villain who “sits on his throne in his palace of bones” (“it’s time to go”). Meanwhile, Big Machine label head Scott Borchetta’s sale of the recordings has been portrayed as nothing short of a literal funeral (“My Tears Ricochet”). With Swift on the cusp of being a billionaire, she’s long past the point where she can conceivably frame herself as the underdog. And she is well aware of that fact—perhaps you’ve heard her hit song “Anti-Hero.” But it’s become such a rallying cry for her fandom—really, a foundation, ever since she put out “Mean”

in 2010—that the sentiment has been hard to let go of.

It’s not a stretch to say that Swift has benefited from a certain degree of speculation surrounding her work and who it may be inspired by (the queer readings of her music alone have spawned an entire subculture). But after years of positioning herself as a maligned adversary of the media, Swift is quick to stamp out any interpretation that she doesn’t find suitable. On November 30, Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, who is now something of a celebrity herself, made a rare statement from her personal account on Twitter/X, calling out the popular gossip influencer Deuxmoi for their repeated claims (“fabricated lies,” Paine called them) that Swift and her ex-partner Joe Alwyn were secretly married. “This is an insane thing to post,” Paine wrote, attaching a screenshot from a recent Deuxmoi Instagram story where they repeated the claim. “It’s time for you to be held accountable for the pain and trauma you cause with posts like these.”

Along with potentially forming the basis for litigation, Paine’s use of the phrase “pain and trauma” brings to mind a number of recent instances where celebrities have emphasized their personal experience as evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the press. In a December Instagram caption, Billie Eilish, who had just received a Variety Hitmakers Award for her song “What Was I Made For?,” wrote, “thanks variety for my award and for also outing me on a red carpet at 11 am instead of talking about anything else that matters i like boys and girls leave me alone about it please literally who cares stream ‘what was i made for.’”

What actually happened is that, in a cover story for Variety’s Power of Women

issue, Eilish went on record as being “attracted to [women] as people. […] I’m physically attracted to them. But I’m also so intimidated by them and their beauty and their presence.” Later that week, on the red carpet for the Hitmakers Awards, Eilish was asked by a different Variety reporter if she had “mean[t] to come out in that story,” to which Eilish responded, “No, I didn’t, but I kind of thought, wasn’t it obvious?”

(As an aside, the red carpet reporter said, “We need to get to a point where [people] don’t even have to come out.”)

As her post on Instagram made clear, Eilish was justifiably irritated by having her sexual orientation be the main takeaway from her cover story, which was meant to highlight her career achievements. To echo the Variety red-carpet reporter, it would be lovely if a famous person’s queerness no longer made headlines, nor had the potential to jeopardize their job in the entertainment industry, as it often unfortunately still does. But Eilish framing this incident as Variety “outing” her mischaracterizes what happened in a way that could have had serious ramifications for the journalists involved, and has the unintended consequence of devaluing what forcibly outing someone actually means. In other words, to get a bit Conflict Is Not Abuse about it, perhaps Eilish was overstating the harm done to her in order for it to be taken seriously.

This brings us back to Swift’s Time Person of the Year profile, which caused quite a stir on journalism Twitter—as depressing a phrase as there is to write in 2024—for a passage near its conclusion. The profile writer, Sam Lansky, is listening to Swift once again retrace the redemption arc that led her to create Reputation, positioning that album as a triumphant return

from a career on the brink of death. Lansky notes—to the reader, not to Swift—that the album’s lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” was a number one hit and that Reputation sold almost 1.3 million copies in its first week of release—which, to anybody but Swift, would be evidence of an uninterrupted string of successes from 1989 to its successor. “But then I think, Who am I to challenge it, if that’s how she felt?” Lansky writes.

The point is: she felt canceled. She felt as if her career had been taken from her. Something in her had been lost, and she was grieving it. Maybe this is the real Taylor Swift effect: That she gives people, many of them women, particularly girls, who have been conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting, and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential, permission to believe that their interior lives matter.

In another time and place, where celebrities didn’t exercise unprecedented control over their public image via social media, thus rendering the art of the magazine profile a shell of its former self, a reporter might have pushed back on Swift’s retelling. (Although, let’s be honest, Time Person of the Year has never really been the place for that, and that’s almost certainly why Swift agreed to the interview.) What’s more revealing of Swift’s approach as a storyteller is how, gradually, she has convinced the public to take her emotional experience as the definitive truth. In a Defector blog post responding to the profile, Kelsey McKinney notes that pop stars “have become so good at telling their own personal narratives, and at speaking candidly about the difficulties and trials of fame (which do seem real), that they become completely cocooned from reality.”

This isn’t a new phenomenon—when speaking of actors or particularly magnanimous musicians, you can make the argument that it’s a bonus for their craft if they operate on their own plane of existence. I also don’t think it’s possible to overstate the effect that the recent reckoning over Britney Spears, first through a New York Times documentary and most recently through her memoir, has had on the way celebrities, and female pop stars in particular, are covered in entertainment journalism. Certainly, it has led to a greater discussion of how women in the public eye, and women in general, fall victim to “dismissal, gaslighting, and mistreatment” regarding their lived experience—a conversation that, contrary to what Lansky implies, Swift has not been the primary innovator of, not even in music.

I’d like to believe that there is a way to accurately present an artist’s way of seeing the world, and their place in it, while acknowledging the subtle ways in which they’ve tweaked, shaped, or mutated the details to fit the story they’re trying to tell. Or that it’s possible to be a fan of someone’s work without taking everything they say at face value. Stan culture has led many people to believe that these things are incongruent with each other, but given that online fan communities are—and I don’t mean this facetiously—the primary archivists of pop culture as it stands, an incredulous eye towards how the last icons of monoculture are presenting themselves is now more important than ever.

I think back to how Swift wrote “All Too Well” as a song built not only on catharsis and the exorcizing of old demons but also, fittingly, on memory—the elements of the past that stick with us, and the

mnemonic details (autumn leaves, traffic lights, a red scarf) that become placeholders for the emotions we may have felt at the time, allowing us to mythologize our own experience. Swift’s most devoted fans have put insurmountable trust into how she has presented her hero’s journey, in no small part because, through her music, she has reflected the truth of their own lived experience back to them. She’s made it easy, even preferable, to conflate her memory with our own.

Mary O shaughnessi Nolyoaks

Courtesy of the Artists at The Gate Collective

THIS IS ALSO A TEST

On Newborn Island

by Nada Alic

My baby writhes against my chest, grunting in an animal way. I hold him close and vow not to move a muscle because, like an animal, he can sense fear and this is a test. I will spend an hour contorted into this shape, a human container for this slippery eel, this pulsating nerve. I wait for my baby to tire himself out, maintaining a placid facial expression, as if to say, This does not exhaust me. I am an ancient, unbreakable stone for you to thrash against. I stare at my phone, just out of reach, and attempt to move it using the power of my mind. I take a breath (my mistake) and he throws his head back with muscular force, then slams it onto my collarbone.

I cradle his neck and for a moment he is still. He looks up at me and, without breaking eye contact, releases an oceanic shit into his diaper. Good job, I sing, patting the damp pool spreading up his backside, good job, as if we’d both just taken the biggest shit of our lives and now we can finally rest. He looks satisfied, near sleep. His eyes roll back, and his eyelids fall and rise and fall again. This is also a test. Despite the obvious visual cues suggesting that he is very sleepy, he is very much awake. I understand this to be some kind of baby performance art, which, like all performance art, is meant to annoy the audience. Soon he will open his eyes and scream. I want to scream, too, until I remember that I am a stone.

My baby is eight weeks old today. I am writing from the first draft of motherhood. I am raw and hormonal and I am mostly winging it. I possess almost no maternal wisdom, a quality that is acquired in hindsight, with enough time and experience. No, I am in the right now of it. I am in real time, in real life. My memory has yet to be pruned and polished into a coherent narrative and I feel too tired and stupid to smooth out the edges. I tell myself that coherence is a form of deception. That we evolved to arrange chaos into patterns as a way to cope with death. That my attempt to write from inside an experience is actually subversive, and not lazy and diaristic. That my embarrassment is a sign that I should keep going, that I’m tapping into some fundamental truths about life.

Is this art? I wonder, taking a photo of my baby. It’s not. I look at the photo, while holding my baby in my other arm. The baby in the photo sits still, allowing me to behold him. I zoom in on his ears, his

cheeks, the tiny white bumps constellating his nose. Arm baby pukes in my hair. I use my shirt to wipe it and return to the photo with renewed focus. I want to send the photo to someone, but I try to space it out every couple of days so as not to exhaust people with my profoundly ordinary obsession, my bursting heart and the endless punishment I incur for having it (sleep deprivation, boring personality, leaking breasts, etc.). Sending a photo of your baby is like recounting a dream: its meaning disintegrates upon contact, leaving you feeling exposed and humiliated. But I need them to see how beautiful he is and forgive me for disappearing. If they can see how beautiful he is, they will know that my disappearance was worthwhile. Also temporary, as evidenced by my effort to reach out (do they know how hard it is to reach out from newborn island?), I will text something like “I’m alive” and wait for an “aww” and that will be enough. No time for an exchange of how are yous because the baby is always so right now, so all the time.

Too many wants. I want more time to write this piece. I want this piece to flow. Or I want it to appear fragmented and wabi-sabi-like but ultimately to have an underlying narrative that makes it work. I want to be forgiven if it doesn’t. I send a draft to my brother and he tells me it starts off strong but then loses steam halfway through. I agree with him, but doesn’t everything lose steam halfway through? Isn’t that just physics and therefore natural? I want to work on my manuscript. I want to rewrite the draft and make it good this time. I want everyone to stop asking me how the novel is going. I want the novel to be exactly like it is in my mind (brilliant). I also want to give my husband time to work.

I want him to be free to do what he wants. I want to want less and feel content to just take care of a baby. I want to go back to how things were, but with my baby and my new perspective. I want to be online. I want to pay off my credit card. I want my old clothes to fit. I want to be an artist and a mother in that order, or at least in equal measure. I want my mom to come back. I want my mom.

I wonder if all of this could’ve been easier, or at least less of a shock, had I spent one human second preparing for life with a baby. I was so sick my entire pregnancy that I could only manage to watch a handful of YouTube videos made by a homesteading doula who cheerfully sang “hey, mama!” before unleashing her tirade against hospital births and offering placenta encapsulation services. Beyond learning what size vegetable my fetus was, I was mentally checked out. My pregnancy “journey,” or what I like to refer to as The Worst Time of My Life, was more about survival than preparation. Pregnancy brought me to my knees, literally, as I spent the entire nine months vomiting with constant foodpoisoning-level nausea. I also had gestational diabetes, which is diabetes … but pregnant! This meant I had to test my blood four times a day and report to a specialist at a place with the least comforting name: High Risk Maternity. When I thought about pregnancy before it happened to me, I only thought vaguely of cravings and stretchy pants. Now I think only of illness.

If newborn life is an island, pregnancy sickness is a distant, uninhabitable planet. The relentless pain of pregnancy blotted out any trace of my former self, of my egoic preoccupations, and with them, my will to get out of bed/live. I told very few

people about what I was going through and instead disappeared under my covers crying and watching paranormal reality shows. I was ashamed, as if my body’s reaction revealed my ambivalence about having a child. I spent a lot of time thinking about the truths we hide from one another. The people who disappear from time to time and what they might be going through, the silent pains they endure, the meaning they try to make of it.

On newborn island, there is a constant appraisal of time and of making the most of it. I calculate the hours between feedings and naps, the shoddy patchwork of minutes between tasks that feel like nothing. I measure my time against my husband’s time: who has cared more, whose suffering matters more, who gets to put the baby to sleep and who gets to wipe the crud off the sanitizer (me). Our commitment to equality and fairness has an undertone of competition; the only prize is to continue playing the game forever. I am so glad to be playing with him.

Every day is a sand mandala that I construct and my baby destroys. The daily repetitive tasks and the physicality of caring for another body interrupt my thoughts and short-circuit my tendency to ruminate, mercifully jerking me back into the present moment. I feel entirely alone and at the same time suffocatingly tethered to the billions of parents who came before me, who all felt the same way, and probably other, more complex and interesting ways, rendering my experience wholly unremarkable and basic. I search “newborn stage hard reddit” and realize that parenting is too universal to complain about, like traffic or being broke. Who cares? I mutter to myself, knowing that I secretly do, so much.

I am new kinds of tired, exotic kinds that cause auditory hallucinations. A symphony emerges from our white noise machine. Sometimes voices. “What?” I ask my husband. “I didn’t say anything,” he says.

When I’m alone in my car, which is almost never, I put on Eastern European gangster rap as a way to channel my adolescent aggression. The fact that this music is not meant for me only makes me like it more. As if I have anything in common with these teen boys from the Balkans. I want to be angry at the world too, instead of just afraid of it.

In the afternoon, my baby falls asleep in my arms and I let him. I’m supposed to transfer him to his bassinet but I don’t want to. He recognizes my heartbeat, the smell of me, and I think, What an honor to get to provide my baby with peace and comfort. For once, I feel like a mother. In the evening, he is sound asleep on my husband’s chest and my heart sinks a little.

Thoughts I have while warming a bottle at four a.m.: How do I make a lot of money fast? Will I ever write again? Can a person die from lack of sleep? Can lack of sleep cause long-term brain damage? Two minutes and twenty seconds. I am someone’s mom. I will never not be someone’s mom. A mom is a person and a person can have any kind of thought. Even the bad ones. Can my baby tell when I am having the bad ones? Two minutes and three seconds. Who gave us this Baby Brezza bottle warmer? Babybrezza. Baby. Brezza. Thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven seconds. Jesus Christ. Twelve, eleven, ten seconds. How long can my baby cry before his brain registers this as trauma? Should I pick him up or wait? Hurry the fuck up. Cold. Room temp. Quick warm. On/Off. Four, three, two.

All my life, I thought that if I could spend enough time in my head, I could get at the truth, as if it were something that could be solved. I now know that to be misguided. The truth is right in front of me, in the doing of life, not in the thinking about it. The truth is simple: it mostly involves hunger and sleep. Everything else is just fantasy.

My baby’s tiny hand grips my finger. I wonder if he can tell that the guardian assigned to him by God is still afraid of the dark and cannot locate most countries on a map. He doesn’t yet know that I am unqualified to protect him from the ugliness of the world. Right now, he is too preoccupied with something on the curtains. My baby is always looking at the curtains and I’m convinced he can see something I can’t. This is because he is closer to the spirit world than I am. What do you see? I whisper cautiously. His pupils dilate and contract.

He begins to cry. Do you remember me? I say, looking into his bright blue eyes. I pick him up and rock him. It’s me, it’s me.  Characters from my unfinished novel materialize in my mind with urgent messages. Where have you been this whole time? I ask them. My arms burn from the weight of my baby. Why now? They hover just out of reach. The baby’s cries clear them from my mind like an Etch A Sketch. I let them go.

Leon Untitled

TRUE LIFE: I CALLED OFF MY WEDDING

by Sarah Yanni

Language is a thing with an objective. At times, this objective is known to us before or during the moments when we choose our words. At other times, the objective is a blur. And it is only through speaking word after word that the other side of our lives comes into focus.

As a grant writer, I am constantly making very specific decisions with syntax in order to reach my objective of getting a woman with generational wealth to fund the institutions that employ me. It’s a very calculated pandering, informed by research, key words, and guilt. Wealthy people want to feel like they are doing something meaningful with the money they acquired through their father or oil or banks or whatever. Guilt is a tool.

Since I am a poet, my language also has an objective. It is much more divorced from money, however. I suppose my objective is to take the reader somewhere, to make them think of a topic in a different way, to make me understand my own life in a different way. As with work, I can go back and forth on a single word for hours, questioning whether or not it should go here or there, if it’s the right sort of language to get my point across.

I am less careful with language in my ordinary interactions, and perhaps this is inevitable. People are not a glowing word document on a computer screen; they are living and breathing, attached to narratives, looking at us, waiting. On a sleepy November Saturday morning, I ended my seven-and-a-half-year relationship as the words casually fell out of my mouth: “I think I’m gay.” My partner was silent, then angry. I sobbed. A tower fan was thrown, by him. I changed out of my pajamas and left our rent-controlled Los Feliz apartment—perhaps the true loss being that I would never sleep there again. I had uttered a truth that would shift time and space in an irreversible way. Yet the words were also a fragment of many other truths—I’m gay. I’m unhappy. I’m confused. I’m sexually dead inside. I’m curious. I’m tired. I’m panicking. I’m bored. •

On the plane I watch Little Women. I have only seen it once before, at the art house with my mom. It was around Christmastime, just the two of us on a movie date. I remember thinking that it was good, not worth the hype it received, but we also both cried a lot. Watching it again, I am moved, and I finally understand. In one scene, Jo March—the aspiringwriter daughter who strives to be independent and free—sobs at the news that her sister is getting married. It is not because she hates her sister’s new husband, or because her sister has said something cruel. It’s a deeper tragedy—she cries because childhood is over.

The entire film is a commentary on the female heroine, and how impossible it is for a story not to end with said heroine either married or dead. Marriage is an economic proposition, all the sisters remind each other, each of them navigating love versus convenience over and over again. Countless articles have been written about Jo’s queer-codedness, and I do not wish to be repetitive. It is sad that the only reason audiences could conceive of a character who wants to be a writer and not be around men is that she is a lesbian, but that being said, Jo is definitely a lesbian.

Jo cries for lost childhood; she cries at the sheer capacity of her fellow women, remembering that they have hearts, minds, and souls; she cries at the loneliness of being so independent. Timothée Chalamet confesses his love to her and she turns him down, and for that she is brave. And then she regrets it, maybe. Then he marries her sister, so it does not matter. And then she writes a book—an autofiction precursor

about a group of sisters and their girlhoods, and a protagonist who dreams of telling stories. And at the end of the film, the book is bound in a red cloth cover and sewn together meticulously, and this object becomes her greatest joy. That is why I love her, my true lesbian Jo.

•

The wedding is already fully planned when I call it off. The venue, DJ, photographer, and wedding planner all booked, with nonrefundable deposits.

The months leading up to this are a flurry of site visits and phone calls. I stalk Instagram wedding content until I want to throw up. I take a quiz online and learn that the style of wedding I want to have is “Bohemian.” So, I go on Pinterest and I type “bohemian wedding” and then “bohemian wedding inspo.” I begin to save images of baby’s breath garlands, exposed wood beams, long 100-person dining tables with flowy linens, clusters of thick white votive candles in borderline fire-hazard arrangements, dresses that give off a vibe of white people in a barnyard being whimsical. On every phone call I have with a potential photographer or wedding planner, I try to make myself clear—I’m looking for something different. I have to try not to say the word “indie” even though I know that’s what I mean.

My mother comes with me to visit venues and we both swallow in silence as they begin to tell us numbers. Weekend rate is $15,000, or we could do a weekday for $8,000. This does not include food or anything else, simply a room with a lot of plants and exposed brick. They offer a discounted rate on the metal folding chairs that are described as “minimalist” and I imagine

my whole family flying in from Mexico just to sit for hours, unsupported, on the tiny metal seats. I cool my fiery nerves by thinking of the wedding as an abstract dinner party I get to plan. And my mother soon turns her hesitation into excitement. Because this—her firstborn daughter’s wedding—is the ultimate symbol of successful parenting. The price is steep but she is willing to pay whatever it takes. We have worked hard for this, both of us surviving my rebellious late adolescence, my hatred for institutions and family normalcy. No, we’re here, with a high-strung girly venue coordinator holding a clipboard, and we’ve made it.

In these planning months, I barely sleep.

It is summer when my two best friends get engaged. We joke that it will be the gay wedding of the century.

Before one friend proposes, she tells me about her plan to do so. A fancy restaurant in Ojai, over a short stay, maybe I could be there, hiding at another table, taking photos. I feel privileged to carry this secret. She even shows me the ring online, the one she ordered. It is an ugly lesbian ring that is dark and blunt. I tell her it is beautiful.

She ends up scrapping the Ojai idea and proposing in the Philippines while they are with her family. They have a blissful photo shoot on the beach—a masc and a femme gallivanting on white sand at sunset, rings on their hands. I have never seen a more beautiful sight, and my heart bursts with happiness for them.

They are both overwhelmed by the entire thing, and I remind them: I’ve done my research. I offer to send them my Google documents, slides, spreadsheets,

references, vendor list, budget breakdowns, anything. We all speak about the logistics without acknowledging the strangeness. Like a ghost, this thing I planned for that never existed. Maps with no destination, piles of documents that will eventually be moved into the trash, after enough time passes that they have not been opened.

•

Maggie Millner’s 2023 poetry collection

Couplets: A Love Story centers on a narrator who ends her straight, long-term relationship after falling for an older academic dyke—“she was queer and edited periodicals / and I was a poet who had never dated a woman.” Without disclosing too many details, I found kinship in every stanza.

Millner recalls the slow deterioration of the straight relationship—opening with an initial intent to escape, pushing the threshold of disagreements—and the messiness of the enlightenment that follows: “I’ve hurt people I love being so / late to my desires.” She muses beautifully on the inevitability of queerness, “the knowing gaze / of Destiny,” and the tumult of those first queer months, at once full of freedom and strangeness.

Turning page after page, I felt deeply that Millner understood me. Understood that it is hard to hurt people, and to admit you have been deceitful, but that it is harder to swallow the truth forever. Both of us mourn and celebrate at once.

“You could have had everything you wanted, / had it been what you wanted.”

•

My phone alerts me that it is out of storage. It is time for at least an hour of scrolling through my photos and deleting old ones.

This practice has become especially strange in the past two years. I have learned the “Hide” function, and where my phone detects photos of my ex’s face, I have instructed it to hide the image. I encounter, first, a block of screenshots. Dozens and dozens of wedding dresses, most from the Anthropologie wedding line. Of course, no dress is modeled on anyone over a size two, so anything and everything looks stunning. Further down my 23,108-photo library, I scroll past my high-definition engagement shots. The “Hide” function has failed me, because my face is detected as the principal object. Few events in the last decade of my life have been captured by professional photography, but this is one of them. The photos themselves are impossible to miss even in a rapid scroll—my dress is a bright orange-red, the background a stark leafy green. My mouth is agape. I am sobbing. I can still remember the feeling in my stomach.

•

On another plane ride, I watch Pride and Prejudice. Despite my tendency to be gay, Mr. Darcy makes my heart leap. In this story, the Bennett sisters’ only pursuit is marriage. Their mother’s emotional state hinges upon the romantic prospects and successes of her daughters, and the film is comical and old-fashioned and also romantic and beautiful. I do not remember the Jane Austen text at all, but I believe the film has adapted it well. I can quote the movie line by line, some useless part of my brain now reserved for the memorization of their outdated dialogue.

Of course, the characters who bicker like enemies are the ones who have loved each other the whole time. We know it, we

love it: the slow burn. I watch gleefully as Elizabeth Bennet (Kiera Knightley) tantalizes Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen a.k.a. Succession’s Tom Wambsgans) with her stunning cheekbones, slight underbite, and aloofness. And I am fervently rooting for their marriage the entire time. I want Elizabeth Bennet to succeed—for her to get Mr. Darcy, for them to have a gorgeous wedding in the English countryside. Thus here, perhaps, I ascend and transpose myself. I assume the role of the mother, overly invested in this consecrated act. Or maybe I am she, Elizabeth Bennet herself, my romantic heart attaching to Darcy as the cis version of my masc-ofcenter fantasy. Whatever the case, the film is a stand-in I watch again and again, as if somehow it could fill the gaps in my own life. As if the protagonists’ love could mend my own wounds. As if someone else’s presence could fill my absence.

•

The ring now sits in the cupboard beneath my bathroom sink. It’s bent and broken, half-crushed metal and leftover diamonds in a little purple jewelry bag. I do not know what to do with it. Every time I look at it, I try to imagine the movements of a hand that made it bend the way it did. Was it a hand? Or was it crushed beneath a shoe? Perhaps it was thrown with such force that it warped. Whatever the velocity or method, it is a remnant of human anger, a broken thing.

It is an object, lacking meaning to me. The truth is, I cannot part with it.

Bettina

Phenomenological New York (1970s)

Gelatin silver print (printed by Bettina) 9 × 6 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

HOLE IN THE MIDDLE

On Pier Paolo Pasolini and the emptiness of the bourgeois

by Leo Lasdun

“He’s a monster. A dangerous criminal. Conformist, colonialist, racist, slave trader, a mediocrity!” Maybe you’re picturing someone you know. And, according to a crotchety Orson Welles in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 film La Ricotta, you’d be right to— those are his thoughts on the “average man.” La Ricotta was Pasolini’s contribution to Ro.Go.Pa.G., a quadripartite medley of shorts by himself, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and the mostly forgotten Ugo Gregoretti. Pasolini’s segment stars Welles as the director of a colorful film about the crucifixion.

On Welles’s rowdy set, the starving extra Stracci (i.e., “rags”) grovels and scrounges for a morsel of cheese, while the opulent stars eat caviar and pamper their dogs; Stracci soon dies of indigestion on the cross as the Roman press looks on. On his final day, he is kicked around and mocked by actors and producers, and has his meager lunch stolen by a Pomeranian.

Welles’s character is a stand-in (a sit-in really, since he barely leaves the director’s chair) for Pasolini, while the punished Stracci (whose role in the mise en abyme is not as Jesus but as the penitent thief, Dismas) is Pasolini’s ideal Christ figure: derelict, provincial, human. Pasolini’s lambasting of the common man, just a tiny moment in a short film, reveals the acute polarity of his interests—in the most noble and rarefied and in the most abject and lowly—and his dismissal of everything in between. There have been many literary filmmakers, many very good ones, but very few who share Pasolini’s ability to satirize tradition, to join the high with the low while totally shirking the middle.

Pasolini’s disdain for the middle was a political position that bled into his artistic life. In conversation with a semi-senile Ezra Pound, the Catholic-Marxist Pasolini asked the desultory fascist poet if he “accepted paternity” for Italy’s avant-garde literary movement—a movement Pasolini critiqued as “typical of highly bourgeois, industrialized nations.” Equating avant-gardism with the parochial bourgeois (and, through Pound, with fascism) was a bold move for Pasolini, who had made and would continue to make films labeled experimental, though he would likely have considered that label critical malpractice. Pasolini, the radical leftist,

positioned himself as an artist working in opposition to the moment’s burgeoning experimentalism, which he saw as conservative and noxious.

Resisting the tide of experimentalism helped Pasolini dodge the pitfalls of the theoretical and abstract (anathema to adaptation, Godard’s very stupid King Lear from 1987). And, in choosing filmable source materials with vibrant plots played on the human scale, such as Oedipus Rex (1967) and The Canterbury Tales (1972), he also escaped the fate of John Huston, another literary-minded director, whose adaptations of Moby Dick (1956) and Under the Volcano (1984) are demented and lame, respectively. (Huston made a number of great adaptations too: his 1979 take on Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood, for example, is worth checking out.) Instead of futzing around with narrative innovation, Pasolini looked for variety in his formal approaches to moviemaking, especially in his rejection of the era’s presiding wisdom about actors. “I hate nuances and I hate naturalism,” he proclaimed, “so an actor inevitably feels a bit disappointed working with me because I remove some of the basic elements of his craft, indeed the basic element—which is miming naturalness.” Pasolini took risks to avoid simulating realism, often forgoing professional extras (whom he thought of as “just hacks”) and sourcing his players instead from the local peasantry of whatever region he happened to be shooting in.

But what does it mean to film adaptations of Oedipus Rex and the Bible with the rustic faces of Italian and Moroccan villagers and prostitutes? What does it mean to cast Enrique Irazoqui, a Marxist student with no acting experience

(his Wikipedia page still lists “computer chess expert” ahead of “actor” in his titles), as Jesus Christ in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)? Was this Catholic Marxism in practice, or just a provocation? Did he simply hate professional actors that much? Considered alongside his politics, his casting decisions might have been an effort to reclaim the idea of “tradition” from the clutches of conservatives and fascists.

Pasolini also felt there was truth in the human face. George Orwell wrote that “[a]t 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”

Pasolini held a sort of counter, less punitive version of this belief: that you’re born with a face etched by your soul. He called fascism the “power without a face,” an idea that, in its inverse, lends a kind of liberatory political power to the visage—a power that, based on Pasolini’s physiognomic sense of character in his films, he clearly believed in strongly.

His most striking procession of faces is his 1964 documentary Love Meetings, about the attitudes of young and old Italians towards sex and relationships. The fact that Love Meetings is a documentary seems unimportant, even coincidental: all of Pasolini’s films, even the narrative ones, feel like vérité—his own brand, something between Rossellini’s neorealism and the later, freewheeling documentaries of Les Blank. In Love Meetings, Pasolini is a field biologist gathering data on Italians for his later analyses. Pasolini the scientist is concerned about the significance of his project, asking two of Italy’s eminent psychologists if the survey “makes any sense,” and referring to it as a “crusade against ignorance and fear.”

Pasolini’s frankness and willingness to engage his interviewees on their own terms,

whether bawdy or prudish, gets him access to insights otherwise guarded or withheld. He is affable, even as he prods and insists.

“I don’t think you can separate love from sex,” says one coiffed student with deep, sensitive eyes. “Girls don’t like me because of my crooked nose,” a smiling soldier gripes. In its breadth of opinions, Love Meetings is a mosaic—movingly personal, thoughtful, and funny. But even here, in a broad study of his countrymen, Pasolini is working within his topography of extremes. He wrangles the thoughts of men, women, children, farmers, prostitutes, soldiers, rich beachgoers, posh northerners, and poverty-stricken Sicilians; but notably absent are the perspectives of Italy’s midsection. “I feel something important is missing in my film—a hole represented by the Italian middle classes,” Pasolini laments. These were not the musings of average men.

•

In 1955, before he had directed a feature film, Pasolini published his novel Ragazzi di vita, previously translated as Hustlers or The Street Kids, and now, less enticingly, as Boys Alive (in a translation by Tim Parks). The book loosely tracks a gaggle of street urchins in Rome’s outer suburbs, centering on the young vagrant Riccetto. Boys Alive is a sort of primitive, slightly less pessimistic rehearsal for the brutal Accattone (1961), Pasolini’s first film as director, which follows a doomed pimp’s dealings in the grimy outskirts of postwar Rome. In Boys Alive, the vignettes range from goofily picaresque (a duo of runaway youngsters sleeping atop a bed of watermelons at a market stand) to grimly violent (a boy called the Neapolitan bragging about beating to death and cremating an old woman and her

two daughters). But each episode is treated with distance, without sentimentality. As in Pasolini’s films, these scenes are merely the truths of underclass life, patches of color in the grand variegated Italian mural, not to be hand-wrung or pearl-clutched over. In a more somber moment, the young Lenzetta ponders death and poverty, in a scene treated with Pasolini’s peculiar brand of tenderness: “[F]eeling a little weak at the knees, an anxious Lenzetta stood still for a moment, brooding, as if in meditation, then lifted a knee to his belly and let out a fart. But it sounded strained, because his heart wasn’t in it.”

As a writer, Pasolini is simple, sometimes too eager to recreate the gritty dialect of the streets, often capitulating to the same forced naturalism he reviled in actors. A typical dialogue between the boys goes “‘Fuck yourself!’ […] ‘Up yours!’ […] ‘Asshole!’ […] ‘Son of a blowjob!’” Granted, swearing is a key feature of adolescent boyhood everywhere, but Pasolini can’t get it to sound quite right, at least to me, an erstwhile profane adolescent boy. Maybe things were different in midcentury Italy, or maybe it’s a product of Parks’s plain translation—these are unknowable quantities for me—but seeing Pasolini, an infallible filmic storyteller, fumble these exchanges is strange, even a bit jarring. What’s the difference between page and screen?

It certainly isn’t a difference of content or context. Boys Alive is full of the same sanctification of The Hard Life that would become Pasolini’s cinematic modus operandi. One senses, rather, that Pasolini was restricted by the medium. In his films, the true grit of peasant life, the sadness of squalor, is omnipresent; it is mise en scène. He struggles in the novel to keep up a similar

level of ambient dejection. In Boys Alive, the true bleakness of these boys’ condition is only approached, intimated frustratingly at the end of a few of the more upsetting vignettes, like a breakthrough reached during the final minutes of a therapy session, forgotten by the next week.

The best example comes midway through the novel, when a few of the boys attend a funeral for their friend who has been killed by a policeman. The last pages of this chapter are some of the book’s most sincere: Riccetto is consumed by the sense “that behind Amerigo’s death was a whole bunch of things whose grim light was reflected on every face,” and wonders how, given the dismal realities of life in the slums, anyone could be expected to pity the deceased. The scene ends with a deep silence, rippling out from the funeral to the Roman thoroughfares, a dispersion almost like the soul-swooning conclusion of James Joyce’s 1914 story “The Dead.”

Pasolini’s oeuvre, so donut-shaped, absent of stories on the median, has an outlier—a piece that tried to fill the middle class–shaped hole he identified in Love Meetings. This is his 1968 film Theorem, a story entirely about the middle. Theorem (or Teorema, as it’s often left untranslated) was Pasolini’s exploration of bourgeois anxiety. A wealthy family in a Milanese suburb is set upon by a mysterious young visitor who turns up at their house, heralded by a telegram saying only “I shall arrive tomorrow.” The visitor embeds himself in the family, seducing each member, playing a shape-shifting game with their repressed desires. For the sick father, he becomes a comfort in the face of illness, reading to him from The Death

of Ivan Ilyich (1886); for the unsatisfied mother, he becomes a commanding beacon of male sexuality; and for the timid children, he becomes a bestower of worldly confidence. He even saves the noble suicidal housemaid from herself. When the stranger leaves, the family collapses, unable to press on in their factitious bourgeois contentment, having been awakened to the primal misery lying just beneath its surface.

Theorem exists as both a novel and a film, developed at the same time (though Pasolini initially conceived of the story as a stage play); each is thus an adaptation of the other. Both texts are quiet, sparse in their dialogue. The book is interspersed with passages of poetry, which take shape in the film’s silent, detached images. Pasolini struggles with the form of the novel as he does in Boys Alive, unable to calibrate the relative quantities of abjection and ecstasy, which find such an easy balance in his films. When Emilia, the housemaid, flees the home to return to her rustic underclass life, Pasolini the writer plays her departure from the family’s wealthy environs as almost comically desolate. He describes pig-faced yokels stepping out of a bus, and a shabby plaza featuring a “shop-window full of coffins.” In contrast, Pasolini the director renders this passage subtly and suggestively, tracking Emilia’s stoic face as the scenery changes from upscale suburbia to flaking rural barracks, smooth saxophone jazz soundtracking her journey. The novel’s existence at all is puzzling since the story works infinitely better on-screen, and in fact much of the novel reads like a screenplay, with directions like “a Mercedes slowly emerges” or “the father’s thumb covers the name of the signatory” (describing a telegram

from what is clearly the point of view of a camera).

The treatment of the bourgeois family in Theorem is surprisingly sympathetic. Pasolini portrays them not as villains but as helpless, blocked-off people, without access to their own feelings, and thus not entirely responsible for the unthinking exploitations characteristic of their class. “[N]o matter what a bourgeois does, he fails,” wrote Pasolini, reflecting on the moral lessons of Theorem.

Does Theorem fill the hole? It is certainly the most refined of Pasolini’s films, with performances from mostly professional actors, portraying mostly urbane characters, in performances that could mostly be called naturalistic. And if he was after the missing piece of Love Meetings, the data that he couldn’t mine (i.e., the drama of bourgeois sexual neuroses), he found it by defining it for himself.

•

Leaving the novels (which really are best thought of as bonus features) aside, Pasolini is still the filmmaker who has done the greatest service to the literary tradition. His love of literature, as well as of sexual transgression, poverty, and potty humor, found their greatest fusion in his late-career trio of adaptations: The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights (1974), sometimes collectively called the “Trilogy of Life.” These three films are Pasolini’s grandest, his most painterly (Renaissance imagery abounds, from delicately composed shots like chapel frescoes to tumbling Bruegelian peasant vistas) and most vital. They are also his most heartfelt acclamations of the human spirit in its extremest forms.

Pasolini’s achievement in the Trilogy of Life was a shedding of pretense. In earlier films, he couched his deviant ideas, often brilliantly, in terms of his Catholic-Marxist politics (as in Theorem or The Gospel According to St. Matthew). In this later triptych, there’s no couching—or, more accurately, these films are unburdened by subtext, since there’s nothing to couch. It is not that the films are apolitical (their frank celebrations of adultery and homosexuality are boldly transgressive) but rather that the politics of each has become explicit—the narratives themselves, in Pasolini’s estimation, are pure politics.

The Canterbury Tales illustrates his agenda particularly well. It’s no surprise that Pasolini cast himself as Chaucer (his period outfit is great, including an adorable little woolen hat), seeing his project as a continuation, rather than a strict transposition, of that author’s work. The bits of Chaucer he chooses to emphasize—and what he chooses to add to the original text—are revealing. For example, in his rendition of “The Friar’s Tale,” which is about a corrupt court summoner who befriends and is eventually claimed by the devil, Pasolini found common ground with Chaucer over their shared disdain for the tyranny of the greedy tattletale. But Pasolini, never a bushbeater, makes his specifically modern political grievances known, showing the summoner busting two different gay couples for the crime of sodomy, the filmmaker’s own addition to the tale.

Just three years later, Pasolini was dead at 53, gruesomely murdered by a male prostitute—or an extortionist or a gang of anticommunist roughnecks or the mafia or somebody else. Theories abound. But it

seems likely, at any rate, that he was killed because he was gay. That these three were the last of Pasolini’s films to be released while he was alive (Salò premiered three weeks after his murder) is touching; that this harsh, visionary critic’s final living word on humanity was not a condemnation but an earthy celebration offers some (perhaps cold) comfort. As Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, Pasolini grins and smirks, his formidable cheekbones stretching like Greek columns up to his trenchant, portaled eyes—a striking face etched by a striking soul.

Bettina

Phenomenological New York (1970s)

Gelatin silver print (printed by Bettina)

9 ¼ × 5 7/8 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

THE GAP AT THE END OF THE WORLD

by Cynthia Cruz

IA black horse falling in darkness to the ground. Three hunters standing at the edge of a hillside in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Hunters in the Snow. Two planets, one lit from the side, the other a pinprick of red light in the distance, moving toward, and then alongside, the first.

The prologue to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) consists of this series of disconnected images. The eight-minute procession opens with a close-up of Justine, the film’s protagonist, played by Kirsten Dunst. The camera remains on Justine’s unmoving face. As a result, she appears fixed in time. Or, rather, she appears to be stuck in a time outside time. The moment within which she is suspended, the close-up image of her face, unlike the other images, does not occur later in the film. As explained later in this essay, this is because Justine’s state is one of subjective destitution, a state that cannot be doubled. Justine exists neither in the past, the present, nor the future. In other words, there appears to be a glitch in the temporal. Displaced, Justine exists within a gap outside time and space. This world between worlds is the psychic space Justine inhabits.

The film’s opening, this series of images presented without connective tissue, has the structure of a dream. Among the images in the prologue is one in which Justine appears in a billowing white wedding gown, attempting to make her way through a clearing in the woods. Though her body is in movement, she seems to be held in abeyance.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud describes dreams as a series of condensations and displacements whereby the unconscious mind disguises that which would be unfathomable to the conscious mind in images and ideas that the conscious mind can better absorb. Ideas and feelings that remain forbidden to the conscious mind are displaced with images from which they did not originate. The dream, in other words, is not, as Freud tells us, a “faithful translation or a

point-for-point projection of the dreamthoughts, but a highly incomplete and fragmentary version of them.” The images that appear in our dreams are strange amalgamations disguising what we are unable to comprehend. Or, otherwise stated: At night while we are dreaming, we are returned to a state of madness.

This is also what Hegel tells us in The Philosophy of Spirit when he says that madness is latent within all. (Hegel’s text, Die Philosophie des Geistes, is translated as Philosophy of Mind, though the “Geist” in the title means “mind” and “spirit.” Because Hegel refers to this entity as “spirit,” I will be using the term “spirit” rather than “mind” throughout the essay.) We return to this state when we dream, for instance, and when we become ill with fever. Hegel describes this interior abyss, this abstract “I,” existing within each of us, as the Night of the World. Night, for Hegel, indicates the world prior to symbolization. When we enter the world, language exists already. We thus enter an already constructed language. But before we enter language, we exist in this Night, this void. This abstract interior, this form of nothingness, is the space we return to when we dream.

This dreamworld we enter, this phantasmagoric Night, is akin to what Hegel describes as “Durchträumen,” or dreaming through. This state is where soul—the spirit still mired in nature—exists in infinite flow. Capitalism perverts this state, which results in a static system of infinite flow without change. This unchanging flow stands in contrast to Hegel’s system, which instead presents a process of liberation.

II

Due to the ubiquity of capitalism’s structure of infinite reproduction, attempts at locating an exit have been unsuccessful. Capitalism’s structure of infinite flow and reproductivity has its origins in the Enlightenment, where the concept of the virus first appeared. Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit, describes the virus of the Enlightenment as multiplying and proliferating, making endless copies of itself. Capitalism, with its origins in the Enlightenment, reproduces many of its characteristics including its viral qualities. A parasite, capitalism takes on the qualities of what it is positioned in opposition to. Because capitalism contaminates all aspects of its world, including our minds— we think and dream, for example, in capitalism—there is no outside to capitalism. Thus, it is difficult, if not impossible, to locate a space between one’s beliefs and desires, and the beliefs and desires of capitalism that one has internalized. Without the ability to locate this crucial space, subjects remain unable to locate capitalism’s structure while at the same time finding themselves drawn into it. How, then, to exit an ever-replicating, all-pervasive system?

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the Enlightenment, or pure insight, as a virus that takes on the substance of its combatant. Though invisible, the virus is ubiquitous, and all overpowering. “It is,” Hegel tells us, “a pervading infection and is not noticeable beforehand as being opposed to the indifferent element into which it insinuates itself; it thus cannot be warded off.” And indeed, spirit becomes infected with the virus, itself becoming infectious, contagious, spreading the virus of pure insight until it has “seized

the very marrow of spiritual life, namely, consciousness in its concept, or its pure essence itself.”

Capitalism’s structure appropriates and distorts Hegel’s system of spirit. Even in its miniature form of the commodity, capitalism mimics spirit. Describing the empty form within which an object appears prior to its transformation into a commodity, political economist Riccardo Bellofiore writes, “The value of a commodity, before it actually being sold [sic], is a ‘ghost.’ It is merely ideal money, which can only turn into real money with the metamorphosis of the commodity into the universal equivalent—a ‘chrysalis.’” This occurs, for example, in capitalism’s ability to conceal the use value of commodities beneath exchange value. Spirit, in contrast, does not cover over contradiction, allowing a gap to remain instead. Though capitalism, like spirit, is also a form of reproduction that introduces contradiction, capitalism, unlike spirit, covers over contradictions. Though contradictions exist, they are disavowed. What we have, then, are contradictions that act as if they are not contradictions or, contradictions that are not “aufgehoben.”

Capitalism’s avoidance of contradiction is a form of perversion that absorbs and alters things. Thus, capitalism is reduced to a system of endlessly reproducing the same, unable to create anything novel.

Despite spirit’s viruslike qualities— appearing as an empty form gaining content through the annihilation of its other—spirit produces a new, changed, copy of itself. As opposed to capitalism’s infinite flow of reproductivity, spirit’s process is one of repeated contradiction, of negating “every fixed determination.” In Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel describes

spirit’s journey as the liberation struggle (“Befreiungskampf”) through which spirit emancipates itself, becomes its self. This three-stage process consists of, first, dreaming through (“Durchträumen”), where spirit is “in immediate, undifferentiated unity with its objectivity”; second, madness (“Verrücktheit”), where spirit is confronted with a particularity it is unable to assimilate into its interior; and, finally, habit, where spirit masters this moment of conflict, resulting in a form of ambivalent mastery. Spirit is nothing but its resistance to spirit: by opposing the obstacle of this estrangement—its self as other as limit—spirit ceaselessly pushes itself beyond its limits, changing its nature. This self-othering, or “Sichanderswerden,” is crucial. Spirit’s liberation occurs through the process of these annihilations, or negations, of its self, the result of which is the production of its true being. These negations are a form of death through which sprit passes. Spirit would die were it not to pass through death. Having annihilated its self, spirit is nothingness without form or structure. Now that spirit has annihilated spirit, in order to work with this emptiness, this nothingness needs stabilization. By positing a limit between its self and nature, by creating this division, spirit creates a means to stabilize this nothingness. This marking of a limit defines subjectivity: spirit becomes what it is by determining what it is not.

III

Melancholia is divided into two parts, each centered on one of the film’s two female protagonists, sisters Justine and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). In the first half, Justine arrives at her wedding party with

her groom (Alexander Skarsgård), whom she has just married. But rather than go inside the mansion to greet the guests who have been awaiting their arrival, Justine runs off to the stable to see her horse. This act is the first in a series of attempts at breaking away from the external world that will follow, culminating in her final withdrawal when she succumbs to melancholia. The second half of the film opens with Claire on the telephone, coaxing Justine to leave her apartment and meet the cab waiting to bring her to Claire’s home. The conversation is one-sided—we see and hear only Claire and must discern what Justine is or is not saying. Justine’s resistance appears to us, in other words, through its negation. The arduousness she experiences in her attempt to reach the cab is made clear only by Claire’s continued insistence and encouragement on the telephone. When Justine arrives at Claire’s home, the same mansion where her wedding party took place, she retreats immediately to bed.

The film’s doubling most obviously plays out in the difference between the two sisters. At the same time, this dichotomy can be understood as a mirroring of Justine’s two selves: her true being versus the mask she is forced to wear. Reduced by others to her external characteristics—for the first half of the film she is constantly pronounced by her significant others as beautiful and happy (or unhappy)— Justine withdraws when she is no longer able to perform this false self. The film’s doubling is further reproduced throughout the film in, for instance, her father’s (John Hurt) “Bettys” (his two “wives”), and Jack’s (Stellan Skarsgård) double role as Justine’s employer and best man.

Another doubling occurs with Jack’s nephew, Tim (Brady Corbet), and Justine’s groom, Michael. Jack bribes Tim with the promise of a job if he can coerce Justine to provide a tagline for an image of three women in underclothing, splayed on the floor that Jack projects on the wall during his wedding toast. As Tim hunts Justine down with the photograph, he mirrors Michael’s actions in a later scene when Michael hands Justine a photograph of an apple orchard. The photo depicts land Michael has purchased for Justine as a wedding gift. Though Justine feigns interest, promising Michael she’ll carry the photo with her wherever she goes, she leaves it behind when she exits the room. In both instances, Justine is being hunted down for a tagline, an accurate appraisal, or naming, of an image depicting capital. This strange, doubled hunt is an attempt at an act of exchange wherein, in order to be placed within the symbolic system—wife, art director—Justine must exchange an image—three thin models in a photo shoot, or a plot of land—into language. She is, in other words, one among the other forms of commodities. This is made explicit by the material aspect of the proposal: Tim and Michael each place their photos upon Justine’s body. Strangely, what Justine appears to be called to name is the magical aspect of exchange value trapped within the objects in the images. She is being asked to put into words that which animates the objects represented in the images, that which is invisible and, in a material sense, does not exist.

Capital and exchange are ubiquitous throughout the film, not only in the opulence of the hosts’ mansion and the wedding excesses. What is ubiquitous is exchange:

from Justine’s groom’s exchange of land for Justine’s hand in marriage to Justine’s brother-in-law, John (Kiefer Sutherland), who spends much of his time at the wedding griping about how much money he has spent on it, asking Justine whether she is aware how much the wedding has cost him. When she tells him she hopes his investment is worth it, he replies that it depends on whether or not she is happy. Indeed, the word investment is described by cultural theorist Joseph Vogl as a basic capitalist function that “transfers financial resources in order to reproduce relations of social dependency and structures of obligation.” Here, the film accurately names these transactions as her fiancé’s purchase of land, her employer’s offer of a promotion, and her brother-in-law’s financial investments, which are all attempts to bind social relationships through debt.

Justine’s retreat into melancholia can be understood as self-preservation. Her marriage will transform her into a wife, endowing her with, as philosopher Eric Santner puts it, a new social status and role within the symbolic universe. In other words, her wedding marks a “crisis of investiture,” defining an excess, or too-muchness, brought about by a subject’s confinement to a particular symbolic position. Lacan tells us that melancholia results from this too-muchness, which he calls “jouissance. ” Santner describes this transmission as a charge that enters the body that one is unable to metabolize, the result of which is a psychotic break. This charge manifests in a weight one experiences in the body or, as Santner writes, in the flesh.

In one of the most powerful scenes in the film, Claire holds Justine’s long, thin body before a bathtub in an attempt to

guide her sister into the bath. Although Justine’s body is thin, she appears to be weighed down. This weight is the physical manifestation of melancholia in the body, the weight or debt Santner refers to when describing the substance that enters the body through investiture. This substance enters, Santner writes, “like a strange alien presence—an imminent heterogeneity—into [the body] of the people.” This “strange alien presence” Santner describes can be seen as the globs and pools of gelatinous matter Marx attributes to the spectral quality of value, that which has a mesmerizing effect, propelling subjects to it while simultaneously altering their very nature.

The second half of the film depicts the time leading up to the world’s end, which will occur when a planet named Melancholia collides with Earth. When Justine learns of the possibility of Melancholia’s collision, and thus the imminent end of the world, she wakes from her stupor. Why does Justine experience relief upon this realization? In her melancholia, Justine is withdrawn into her interior, without knowing what she grieves. Once she finds out about the impending cataclysm, she becomes able to see what it is she has lost. As philosopher Alenka Zupančič explains, the end of the world has the ability to outline what until then has remained obscured:

We can lose it all; but the idea of the whole (of an all that can be lost) only appears through a negation; it only constitutes a whole in the perspective of being potentially lost. In other words, there is no (existing) totality, no “whole of the world,” which could be eventually (actually) lost in an atomic

apocalypse; it is, paradoxically, only the perspective of this very (potential) loss which constitutes it, or makes it appear, as such a totality or whole.

“The true choice,” Zupančič writes, “is between ‘losing it all’ and creating what we are about to lose (even if we lose it all in the process): only this could eventually save us, in a profound sense.” Justine does not mourn the destruction of Earth; rather, she becomes able to mourn the loss of a possible future when she realizes the world in actuality is coming to an end. As Zupančič puts it: “The problem is that apocalypse is not so much the end of the world as it is itself first and foremost the revelation of a new world.

Until she discovers the imminence of the world’s end, Justine exists inside a state of suspension. She is stuck in pure being. Hegel describes this state, writing, “Thus, for instance, ‘man-in-himself’ is the child, whose task is not to remain in this abstract and undeveloped [state of being] ‘in-itself,’ but to become for-himself what he is initially only in-himself, namely, a free and rational essence.” Who she is has yet to be uncovered. She is undead: neither truly alive, nor dead, she exists, rather, in the space between. As with madness, there is a good and a bad undeadness. Undead can describe the zombie state of subjects trapped in capitalism, forced to sell their labor for survival. On the other hand, Santner, in his writing of W. G. Sebald about melancholy, describes undeadness as “the space between real and symbolic death,” referencing Walter Benjamin’s description of undeadness as “petrified unrest.” This latter form of undeadness is a space between, a suspension, one of waiting to

become, whereas in the former, the undead is one who is trapped in a form of death while still physically alive.

IV

A subject becomes what it is by determining what it is not. Each time a subject posits something, it falls back into the void of its abstract interior—what Hegel calls the Night of the World, back into momentary madness. Hegel describes the moment spirit recognizes its limitation as a split when it can either recoil back into its interior abyss of madness or move through its limit, an act Hegel describes as an act of madness (Verrücktheit). Madness occurs both in spirit’s retreat into its interior abstraction and in its moving through its limit. In other words, madness inhabits passage. Thus, in order to change, a subject must necessarily move through madness. This is why Hegel claims that madness is a latent possibility within all. One can also fall back into madness as a result of what Hegel describes as a “stroke of great misfortune, by a derangement of someone’s individual world, or by the violent upheaval and coming-out-of-joint of the universal state of the world.” Providing the French Revolution as an example, where he writes, “many people became insane by the collapse of almost all civic relationships,” Hegel links madness to revolution. Because this disarray undoes the structures that were hitherto considered the edifices of reality, this moment presents a radical opening. Hegel posits habit as a means to treat madness. And yet habit, though it produces freedom from madness, can itself become habit in the form of oblivion. Habit is the repeated practice of an act that, though it initially appears unnatural, becomes

second nature through repetition. Because it provides stability, habit is necessary for both a subject’s interior cohesion and for social cohesion. Thus, habit produces freedom. And yet, once a behavior becomes habit, one loses awareness of it, the result of which is unfreedom because one is only free when cognizant of what one is doing. As Alain Badiou tells us in Theory of the Subject, what is repeated remains hidden. Through repetition, we forget the difference. Due to repetition, capitalism becomes habit, or second nature, invisibilizing itself. This forgetting is critical, as Hegel tells us: “[E]very individual is a world of determinations over whose unity we have power; and when we forget, we no longer have power.” And yet capitalism’s compulsive structure of repetition produces forgetting. Indeed, due to its plasticity, its ability to adapt itself to everything, capitalism itself becomes habit. If habit is the practice of repeating an act that becomes nothing over time, then capitalist habit is habit that, sublimated into capitalism, makes, through the act of repetition, everything the same. As a result, difference vanishes. Consequently, capitalism’s structure of infinite repetition without contradiction, or contradiction that is covered over, produces a gigantic forgetting machine. With nothing to help orient us, no interruption of error, we are drawn into its infinite flow without recourse. The very mechanism that ought to provide a remedy for madness becomes itself a form of madness. As with undeadness, there are also good and bad forms of madness. In the case of the former, madness is movement, intrinsic to change. And yet madness can also result in a kind of stuckness where, as discussed above, one is trapped

within infinite movement and repetition without any possibility for novelty. Madness, for Hegel, is “an essential stage in the development of the soul,” inherent to both the body and spirit of all humans. Indeed, it is, as he writes, a “privilege of folly and madness” (Mensch hat Vorrecht der Narrheit und des Wahnsinns). Here, Hegel’s use of the term “Vorrecht” suggests that humans have not merely the right (-recht) to go mad but the vor, or preright to go mad, a right that comes before a right. If madness is a Vorrecht, it is a privilege, a special right that one is granted. Thus, madness is a right that one is unable to claim. Latent within us, madness remains a possibility that we can neither choose nor not choose, that we can neither plan for nor plan to evade. Madness is a paradox, as Lacan tells us: “The mad person is the only free human being.” And the mad subject does not have a choice: “Not just anyone can go mad.”

V

Subjective destitution, like madness, exists latently within all, and like madness, because it annihilates all hitherto habits and beliefs, such destitution results in radical freedom. Lacan’s concept of subjective destitution, or what Lacan also calls “désêtre,” or “unbeing,” marks the termination of analysis where fantasy, what had hitherto served to obscure reality, finally falls away, releasing a subject to the freedom of unbeing. Akin to Hegel’s absolute knowing, this state is described by Lacan as one of “absolute disarray,” where a subject is reduced to its “purest” and “emptiest,” and is confronted with the fragility of its own life, which is also to say, its death. Like madness, subjective destitution also results

in a state of disarray, of absolute disorientation. This space between what we are no longer and who we are yet to be is akin to spirit’s beginnings when spirit is pure being, immediate, or “natural spirit.” As Hegel writes, “this pure being is the pure abstraction, and hence it is the absolutely negative, which when taken immediately, is equally nothing.” Each of us exists in this state before we enter the cut of language, and then, again, each time we acquire a new habit. A moment of madness and disorientation, it is one where we are returned to our original nothingness. Like subjective destitution, madness provides a cut in the seamlessness of capitalist reality, or, as psychologist Néstor Braunstein writes, citing Lacan: “Madness is a separation, an interruption of the social link. It is in this sense that even if one cannot choose madness, a madman is the ‘last free man,’ who has been freed from the restrictions imposed by shared conventions.”

For Lacan, the end of analysis results in subjective destitution, the state where fantasy—the ideas one has imagined about one’s self and the stories connected to such ideas, all the ideas and stories one comes up with to explain how one is exceptional, so much worse or better than others, and so forth—are worked through and removed. As a result, the subject stands before the abyss—because they are now without their previous protection of fantasy, which functioned as a means of obscuring reality—in a state of sheer anxiety. Inherent to Lacan’s articulation of subjective destitution, the analysand is rendered to a state of “Hilflosigkeit” (helplessness) akin to infanthood and yet infanthood without a mother. Hence Badiou, in his analysis of Mallarmé, describes such a state as “this anxiety of the

void [that] cannot be cured with any trace of the setting sun.” It is in this space that we transition from one state of being to the other, where, as Žižek writes,

we overcome mortality and enter undeadness: not life after death but death in life, not dis-alienation but extreme self-abolishing alienation— we leave behind the very standard by means of which we measure alienation, the notion of a normal warm daily life, of our full immersion in the safe and stable world of customs.

Describing this state, Lacan writes: “That really is what is at issue, at the end of analysis, a twilight, an imaginary decline of the world, and even an experience at the limit of depersonalization. That is when the contingent falls away—the accidental, the trauma, the hitches of history—And it is being which then comes to be constituted.”

Twilight describes, also, the space precipitating a subject’s descent into psychosis. As Lacan writes of Daniel Paul Schreber, who recorded his own psychosis in memoir, “First there were several months of prepsychotic incubation in which the subject was in a state of profound confusion. This is the period in which the phenomena of the twilight of the world occur, which are characteristic of the beginning of a delusional period.” The result of this excess of investiture, this jouissance, is the fall into the nothingness of the void. This encounter with the other’s investiture results in anxiety that we can understand as a moment of subjective destitution.

For Lacan, anxiety is the suspension between where the subject no longer knows where they are and a future where

they will never be able to find themselves. It is the state of having no ground, because one does not know where one stands. This is, in other words, the momentary madness, the radical disorientation, that Hegel describes—the very moment one stands before the abyss, before they differentiate. This moment of overwhelming jouissance is one of displacement. A double displacement, as it were. Displacement, like madness, undeadness, and habit, can be good or bad. When spirit engages in self-negation, replacing its self with a new, changed, version of itself, we have a good displacement. But when language is perverted through capitalism, resulting in a language delimited by exchange, we have a bad displacement. Hegel describes madness as an overwhelming amount of feeling that one is unable to properly assimilate into their interior system. As a result, the subject finds itself in this contradiction. In this state of madness, or Verrücktheit—a word that means both madness and displacement—the subject is displaced, falling back into their interior abstraction.

“What erupts into awareness in moments of anxiety,” philosopher Joan Copjec tells us in her essay “May ’68, the Emotional Month,” “is not something that was formerly repressed (since affect never is), but the disjunction that defines displacement, which suddenly impresses itself as a gap or break in perception.” In such junctures, one finds one’s self at an edge, before the void. And in such a situation, one either remains at this impossible edge, in a state of helplessness, or one quickly covers this over with action. This is illuminated beautifully when, in Melancholia, the sisters learn of the impending world’s end: while Claire panics, grabbing her young

son, and attempting to flee the mansion on a golf cart, Justine remains calm, accepting the arrival of the final darkness.

In melancholia, one is in the void. In contrast, with subjective destitution, one stands at the edge of the abyss. This edge is a state of anxiety, the terror one encounters when facing the nothing that is not an absence but the presence of something that remains unknown, or, as Lacan articulates, the lack of lack. Copjec tells us:

The final aim of psychoanalysis, it turns out, is the production of shame. That which Lacan himself describes as unmentionable, even improper to speech as such, is mentioned (and mentioned only) on the threshold of the seminar’s close. The seamy underside of psychoanalysis, the backside towards which all the twists and turns have led, is finally shame: that affect whose very mention brings a blush to the face.

Shame literally renders the subject to a state of nothingness because it renders them emptied of speech, that which, according to Lacan, marks the subject as subject.

VI

Shame, Copjec tells us, “is not a failed flight from being, but a flight into being.”

Joan of Arc is the exemplary figure for this “flight into being.” She is also the exemplary figure for the unity of subjective destitution and madness. Abandoning her family, home, and community to follow a voice no one but she can hear, Joan of Arc abandons her self—negating all determinations that make her who she is (daughter,

sister, peasant, worker)—to become this enigmatic something who, at the same time, is nothing. She abandons everything for a community that does not (yet) exist.

In her act of becoming nothing, Joan of Arc becomes everything. Describing Joan of Arc’s act of self-negation, Badiou writes, “A patriot without a nation, a populist without an insurrection, a Catholic without the Church, a woman without man: this is how Joan traverses appearances and subtracts herself from all predicates.” The space she enters is the space between two deaths, the same space in which Antigone exists. In Joan of Arc’s act, she enters the space where one sees the death of one’s life, the limit that, as Lacan tells us, “touches the end of what he is and what he is not.” Neither dead nor living, standing back from her own death, Antigone exclaims, “My life died long ago.” This space is the space that radiates, resulting in what Lacan calls the “blindness effect.”

This site where subjective destitution and madness converge results in an antagonism that makes visible what had previously remained invisible. The passionate annihilation of negative or abstract freedom, one that results either in suicidal or homicidal violence, can instead be utilized for self-annihilation that is not suicide, or rather, not a material suicide, but a suicide of the subject’s individuality. This death provides an illumination, as political scientist Saroj Giri writes in Crisis and Critique: “So there is what lies beneath—immobility, death—but this death is what creates. Death gives rise to space and life.” This act is akin to the process of self-purification Badiou describes as “force” in Theory of the Subject, where he writes that “an individual only arrives at his or her singular force

within the given circumstances by entering into conflict with the network of inert habits to which these circumstances previously confined him or her.” This death of the self, of course, aligns with spirit’s self-annihilation in its process of becoming. As previously discussed, it is in the moment that spirit has engaged in this act of self-negation when it is no longer what it was and is not yet what it will be, that it is plunged again into its abstract being, back into the abyss of madness.

As Žižek has said about madness, “The way to overcome the topsy-turvy world is not to return to normality but to embrace the turvy without topsy.” In his directive that we embrace the “turvy” rather than the “topsy,” Žižek connects subjective destitution with madness. At the same time, by invoking Marx’s critical analysis of capital’s “enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world,” he connects madness and subjective destitution with emancipation. This return to the “zero level” where a subject identifies with their own destitution is where they are “free from all thoughts of self-interest,” without a need for escape because they have already escaped. This state is reflected in Melancholia when, in contrast with Claire’s mindless frenzy in her attempt to save herself along with her fantasy of what the world is, Justine remains calm. It is a position that, in turn, is antagonistic. This site where madness and subjective destitution converge is an exit from capitalist oblivion because, in its radical undoing, this unity, or force, finds what is otherwise hidden.

Because capitalism contaminates all aspects of its world, including our minds— we think, for example, and dream in capitalism—there is no outside to capitalism.

Fredric Jameson’s comment that the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism speaks to the deficit in imagination that has been brought about vis-à-vis capitalism. Indeed, there is concretely, since 1989, no outside to capitalism, and, because capitalism contaminates everything, there is also no way to imagine outside of capitalist imagining. In fact, with capitalism, imagination—forgetfulness of the past, of who one is, and of the very structure one is living in—is what obscures. Indeed, the very existence of capitalism and its ideology is similarly rendered invisible. Imagination plays an important role in this trick. People imagine that they are free, that they have choice; the lack of evidence otherwise coheres with imagination, binding the two. It changes their subjecthood, their comprehension of who and what they are. The negation of what is not, brought about by the appearance of what is—the ability to see and register the shadow of what could be in the appearance of what is—brings to light a world that as of yet does not exist, a world that lies dormant, awaiting our creation. Such a world cannot be constructed from the world we have now nor from the thinking that emerges from the world as we know it. Instead, we must create something entirely new from that which does not yet exist.

Selection from Footprints, Poems, and Leaves (1968, 2024) by Martin Wong. Facsimile edition published by Primary Information. © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of Primary Information, the Martin Wong Foundation, and P·P·O·W, New York.

(facing page) Eddy Gaga Everything Must Go Collage for Exhibition Flyer “Everything Must Go” at The Horse Hospital Courtesy of the Artists at The Gate Collective

INTRODUCTION

by Perwana Nazif

Etel Adnan once remarked that she no longer believed in truth. For her, as well as for many other thinkers and writers who have approached the subject, truth has often presented an unsolvable dilemma, in terms of its existence, its conditions, and the potential impossibility of resolution. The works presented in this portfolio release hold of truth, named and otherwise, while continuing to explore the effects of its assertion and its stakes.

The Gate Collective describes itself as “a community arts center and collective for people with learning disabilities based in West London.” The portfolio here presents pieces by artists whose work might historically be classified under the violent rubric of “raw” and “outsider” art collapsed with truth. Such histories relegate these self-taught artists exterior to art and larger cultural production (in the art world, this kind of exclusion produces value; it creates artistic meaning by depoliticizing aestheticization). The Gate emphasizes collective practice, engagement and presentation over the fetishized art object.

Eddy Gaga’s Atlas of the World (page 84) maps hip-hop and basketball culture with excerpts of encyclopedia entries from various countries and globes of North and South America. The spheres in the collage—globes and basketballs—refer to the geometrical, cultural, and historical connections drawn in the piece. Gaga’s map traverses various political and cultural sites that ultimately question the assumed truth of cartography and its relationship to territory.

Lizzie Popoff’s JLS Fashion , collages on a T-shirt and hat, similarly unsettles temporal and spatial relations by representing sound. She draws and collages directly on the fabric—colored turntables, which emit multilateral-directed sound waves of varying shapes and scales; pasted photos of live music. Her work reconfigures sensorial realities against some natural truth of perception.

The portfolio also includes a selection of facsimiles of the late artist Martin Wong’s books ( Footprints, Poems, and Leaves and Das Puke Book ) recently published by Primary Information. Both books were first self-published in 1968 and 1977, respectively, before Wong’s move to New York, where he became an essential figure in the 1980s Downtown NYC art scene. They include drawings as well as Wong’s experiments with vernacular and handwriting. This experimentation was later fully realized in his paintings, which featured graffiti and sign language script. Footprints, Poems, and Leaves is a heavily diaristic book of poetry, referencing Wong’s stay in a mental institution, seasons changing, moments of loneliness, and love. Wong often compresses text on the page, playing with letters and placement. In this way, language also structures the way he uses space. The compression and compactness of the words almost encourage the reader to disregard meaning. Wong’s chapbook Das Puke Book , on the other hand, a collection of short stories, delights in disgust. Purging becomes the crucial pursuit here in a smarmy mix of nauseous desire. Through invoking puking, Wong’s excess of language is squeezed, spewed, hurled out. We are left with the remainder exposed and/or disposed indistinguishably in anticipation of and defying truth’s collapse with language or image.

Bettina (Bettina Grossman, though she went by her first name only, b. 1927; d. 2021) was more interested in the way that truth was radically opposed in art and math. She took non-Euclidean geometry as the subject of her series One Constant. Euclidean to Non-Euclidean Curve (1972–73). In her non-Euclidian work, dimensionality seems to liberate truth (and beauty) from the flat plane. Her exploration of non-Euclidean geometry liberates truth itself from any romanticization through an articulated relation to math. In November of last year, Ulrik gallery in New York presented a robust and expansive exhibition of Bettina’s non-Euclidean series and Phenomenological New York (c. 1970s–1980s) along with other select works. Alongside prints and handmade books, Bettina also made non-Euclidean wooden

sculptures: a flat wooden circle, which is then cut into aligned strips and reattached and arranged centripetally, but varyingly, around a wooden peg. The variations of each arrangement emphasize and name the process, the move from Euclidean to non-Euclidean.

Topology is a more precise name for Bettina’s work with mathematics. Topology begins as (non-Euclidean) geometry but eventually becomes a study of continuity (of space and shapes with distortions that do not create, fill holes, or connect the disconnected and vice versa). Topologists are more interested in how we deal with things than with perception. Through the study of topology in Bettina’s work, truth severs its correspondence with any immediate perception of reality. Topology’s experimentation of continuity through distortion marks truth as a correspondence with imagination instead. In her Phenomenological New York series, Bettina materializes a study in continuity as she translates her interest in topology, relation, and distortion into phenomenology. Comprised of silver gelatin prints, chromogenic prints, photographic collages, and Super 8 film, the series documents how buildings in New York reflect through transformations of the skyline as well as street scenes below. The resulting images seem to have infinite variations. These are pluralities born from movement, from hazarding, attempting, and experimenting, rather than a static attachment to truth.

(above)

Lizzie Popoff

JLS Fashion

Collage on cap and long sleeve T-shirt

Courtesy of the Artists at The Gate Collective

(right)

Eddy Gaga

Capital City

Collage

Courtesy of the Artists at The Gate Collective

Duane Warner Album cover

Double sided collage on paper

Courtesy of the Artists at The Gate Collective

(facing page)

John Athnasious Landart Drawing

Courtesy of the Artists at The Gate Collective

Selection from Footprints, Poems, and Leaves (1968, 2024) by Martin Wong. Facsimile edition published by Primary Information. © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of Primary Information, the Martin Wong Foundation, and P·P·O·W, New York.

Selection from Das Puke Book (1977, 2024) by Martin Wong. Facsimile edition published by Primary Information. © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of Primary Information, the Martin Wong Foundation, and P·P·O·W, New York.

(facing page) Selection from Footprints, Poems, and Leaves (1968, 2024) by Martin Wong. Facsimile edition published by Primary Information. © Martin Wong Foundation. Courtesy of Primary Information, the Martin Wong Foundation, and P·P·O·W, New York.

(facing page)

Detail of Phenomenological New York (1972-86)

C-prints (printed and mounted by Bettina)

5 1/4 × 13 1/2 inches

Eddy Gaga

Map

Collage

Courtesy of the Artists at The Gate Collective

Bettina

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

(facing page)

Bettina

Detail of Phenomenological New York (1970s)

C-prints (printed and mounted by Bettina)

26 × 26 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

Bettina

Euclidean to Non-Euclidean Restructures. Options for a Developable Absolute. From the series One Constant. Euclidean to Non-Euclidean Curve (1972–73)

Wood

10 × 10 × 10 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

(facing page)

Bettina

Detail of Phenomenological New York (1970s)

C-prints (printed and mounted by Bettina)

14 × 5 ½ inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

Bettina

Phenomenological New York (1970s)

C-prints (printed and mounted by Bettina)

22 × 26 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

THE

INSTITUTION

by Aria Aber

Most literary was the sun those weeks––it touched everything, and yet it was restrained: first it turned the alphabet blue and lavender, and then it hid the world entirely. The windows were locked, and all the tools were toys. I balanced a bowl of kala namak on my head and called it high art And there were gag orders on the ideas I would develop in my nightly solitude, but all I could think of were the thinkers who, close to the end of their lives, jumped from windows in dusty apartments, because all that thinking got too tedious. It’s important not to imagine just Sisyphus but also the stone as happy—the stone, being rolled up, and down, getting to be touched by the grass everywhere. How happy it is! Imagine! Grass! I had a different lesson to learn, but still, I was dreaming of ecstasy, of oysters with fries and speeding through the night. The stone was my friend, I decided, and every morning, I was a furious child dancing in the grass, the valves of my heart opening to the truth like the gills of a fish in a cold, private river. It was a Tuesday in America. Oh, I was lucky to be here.

(facing page)

Bettina

Detail of Phenomenological New York (1970s)

C-prints (printed and mounted by Bettina) 26 × 23 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

OUT OF THE MOUTH OF BOTS

Child genius and generative machines

by Emily Wells and Aaron Bornstein

Minou Drouet was a child-poet. Born in 1947, she captivated postwar France with poems that the newspaper Le Figaro, as quoted by Time in 1955, called “sparkling with spontaneous sensations, new tingling images.” At the time, much of the French public was skeptical that Drouet’s poems could have been crafted by a child. Even experts in cultural production were drawn in. André Breton speculated that “[b]etween the physico-mental structure of Minou and what is published under her name there is an incompatibility of structure.” And a simple examination of the texts concluded that they exhibited a maturity of expression and experience of life

unavailable to a child. The girl was forced to prove—through a series of tests by journalists, police, and the French Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers of Music—that it was she, and not her overbearing mother, who was the “true” author of the poems. Those who admired or speculated about the authenticity of Drouet’s poetry did so under the presumption that it was of some quality—but by any critical standard, it wasn’t.

Today, Minou Drouet is perhaps best known thanks to an essay in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), which explores the consumerist mania that surrounded the child-poet as a desirable object of attention. Barthes classifies Drouet’s work as “a docile, sugary poetry, entirely based on the belief that poetry is a matter of metaphor, its content nothing more than a kind of elegiac, bourgeois sentiment.” Her poetry is, in his analysis, predictable fluff and formula. Barthes concludes that Drouet was successful at replicating the signs of poetry, not poetry itself: she gave French culture what it believed poetry to be. By focusing on whether or not Drouet was “genuine,” and thus a “genius,” Barthes said her readers took part in “valorizing simple […] production” and thus obscured the fact that she was essentially regurgitating the clichés of the culture around her— like the postwar fetishization of childhood itself. In the publicity photographs taken of her as a child, Drouet looks like a model for a Normal Rockwell painting: playing the piano, writing poetry, petting a cat.

Drouet’s contemporary readers, by marveling at the mere fact of her literary production, often neglected to ask: Is this any good? With our contemporary critical distance, the consensus matches Barthes’s

original assessment: Minou was not, in fact, a good poet. But the focus on Minou was rarely on the content of her poems but rather the mere possibility that a child could create works that seemed to express the feelings of an adult, implying both innate genius and seemingly limitless future development. The idea that a child could become a poet, rather than having poetry imposed upon her, presupposes a conception of literary genius that relies on certain normative notions both of childhood and of poetry. As Barthes put it, “The arguments made about the case of Minou Drouet are by nature tautological, they have no demonstrative value: I cannot prove that the verses shown to me are really a child’s if I do not first know what childhood is and what poetry is.”

In the end, it was not Drouet whom Barthes condemned—it was the bourgeois machine that created her: “It is society which is devouring Minou Drouet, it is of society and society alone that she is the victim,” he writes. “Minou Drouet is the child martyr of adults suffering from poetic luxury, she is the kidnap victim of a conformist order which reduces freedom to prodigy status. […] A little tear for Minou Drouet, a little thrill for poetry, and we are rid of literature.”

As an adult, Drouet wrote children’s novels, one adult novel, and a memoir, Ma vérité (1993), which was described by The New Yorker as “reticent and skimpy.” She did not, as is so often assumed of “genius” children, continue to accelerate for the rest of her life, let alone surpass conceptions of what is possible from a poet. Save for a few counterexamples such as Mozart, the child genius is nearly always disappointing as an adult. They age, like the rest of us, to diminishing returns.

In late November, Google released a video demonstrating its new conversation-bot software, Gemini, fluidly interacting with a user. Not long after its posting, spotters noticed that the video had been carefully edited to support the impression of a more naturalistic give-and-take between user and bot. When Google admitted that the video was edited, the resulting mass indignation recalled multiple such instances from the recent past: supposedly self-driving cars actually remote-controlled by humans, the previous controversy over Google’s Duplex voice assistant software, Meta’s serially confabulating “scientific assistant” Galactica. Given this checkered history, one couldn’t blame society for being skeptical.

But as with Drouet, the impulse to examine the authenticity of a product rather than its quality reveals as much or more about the inquirers as it does about the subject. For Barthes, the myth of the childpoet was reflective of a 1950s French middle class who, by dint of income or vocation, thought of themselves as closer to aristocracy than to the rest of the working class. For these individuals, Barthes argues, it was important for history—social, educational, cultural—to “evaporate,” such that virtuous talents like Minou’s could be seen as inborn. A natural hierarchy of merit justified the greater rewards they were reaping. But embracing this mindset had broader implications: to divorce the product from its production entails a myth not just about the past but also about the future. Society wanted to marvel over the fundamental wonder of Minou creating poetry without dithering over the quality of that poetry; the poems would inevitably improve, as children always do. But with the benefit

of perspective, it is clear that, despite (or perhaps because of) its rapid ascent to passable productivity, her work lacked not just quality but most importantly the central impulse of childhood—the urge to identify oneself among the jumble of experiences. Her poetry (first collected in the volume Tree, My Friend in 1957) is perhaps best thought of as a distillation of the idea of a poem, constructed to satisfy rather than express: “Tree / drawn by a clumsy child / a child too poor to buy colour crayons. / Tree, I come to thee. / Console me / for being only me.” Jean Cocteau, though enamored with Minou, gave perhaps the most withering summary: “All children nine years old have genius, except Minou Drouet.”

A similar magical thinking about the relationship between production and progress is evident in the discourse over so-called generative artificial intelligences—in particular, the chatbots that allow their users to simulate a conversation. Such programs have been around since at least the 1960s, when Professor Joseph Weizenbaum created the ELIZA therapy simulator using a set of handcrafted rules. More recent advances have been supercharged by the availability of massive text datasets, encompassing nearly the entirety of written language. These are fed into so-called “neural networks,” which extract from the trillions of examples a set of statistics summarizing socially transmitted speech—the likelihood that a given word, word part, or phrase might follow from others, in a certain context. After this step, workers repeatedly interact with the program, providing fine-tuning feedback, until the result satisfactorily resembles human discourse. Though even simple ELIZA enraptured its users so much that

Professor Weizenbaum became concerned, the current generation of chatbots has taken hold of the popular imagination. Part of the reason is that these systems no longer use scripted rules, meaning that their inner workings are, for the moment at least, largely inscrutable, even to their developers. This lends an air of mystery that encourages our mythmaking sensibilities.

Over the past several years, the public has engaged these machines in the same way French society did Minou, on the terrain of authenticity. Are they “intelligent” in any meaningful sense? Can such machines be said to “create?” Do their apparent conversational skills signal a genuine “understanding” of self or other? This discourse, too, was anticipated by Barthes, who noted that one of the features of bourgeois myth is that it “economizes intelligence” by “reducing any quality to quantity.”

Never mind that we do not have foolproof definitions of these concepts even when applied to humans, that such concepts may resist operationalization into mechanistic forms, that they may more accurately describe the experience and expectations of the observer than the function of the subject of study.

To question authenticity in this context is to take as self-evident the inevitability of progress toward unlimited potential, thus invoking the metaphor of the “child genius.” This mythologizing extends to software makers as well: a recent failed coup over the leadership of the OpenAI corporation, which produces the ChatGPT conversation-bot service, is rumored to have been spurred in part by concerns over the development of a product that, absent the assumption of inevitable, boundless development, might best be understood

as a calculator. OpenAI’s chief scientist, as well as the rest of the board, was apparently spurred to action by the fact that new software designed to perform arithmetic was now doing so, as reported by Reuters, “on the level of grade-school students,” which to them implied the potential for “escape” towards potentially disastrous “superintelligence.” Others, however, were elated by the same possibility: to their minds “acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about […] future success.”

Both utopian and dystopian fantasies of generative artificial intelligence rely on the presumption of massive acceleration from where we are now, and similarly equate (re)production with invention. Why else would the steady stream of factually incorrect responses generated by chatbots be so frequently categorized as “lying” or “hallucinating”—instead of, simply, failing? Just as the mania over Drouet’s authenticity obscured the question of quality, so the current discussion evades serious thought about the question of “intelligence.” The criteria usually employed in popular discourse to assess this slippery, likely vacuous concept often rely on comparisons to social norms, usually chosen to suit the arguer. While publicly professing to support the fantastical implications of immeasurable intelligence, the corporations producing these machines tend to hold themselves internally to more sober goals—OpenAI explicitly defines “Artificial General Intelligence” as a machine that can “surpass humans at most economically valuable tasks”—in other words, it is an “intelligence” as defined by the demands of the labor market. This may be one reason why the company’s new, explicitly accelerationist, post-coup board of directors includes

the economist Larry Summers, who is infamous for advocating the exportation of polluting industries to countries with lower life expectancies and for publicly doubting the suitability of women for scientific professions. During the period he was invited onto OpenAI’s board, he had been enduring another consequence-free scandal over his promotion of a cryptocurrency firm that is now the subject of a lawsuit by the Office of the New York State Attorney General over alleged fraudulent representation of its products. OpenAI overlooked his checkered past when they sent the invitation to join their board, presumably to gain his insight into how to properly value an immortal, environmentally catastrophic technology of immeasurable intellectual capacity.

That the trajectory of technology is ever accelerating has long been presumed by the technocracy’s chosen public intellectuals. Tellingly, they often have little to say about social factors, instead embracing a quasi-naturalization of technology as an evolved—and evolving—organism. In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, eccentric inventor Ray Kurzweil proposed “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” explicitly casting technology as an “evolutionary process” that will always grow, exponentially, with each breakthrough spurring proportionally more advances. Any barrier faced by a given innovation would, he argued, inevitably be overcome by another. The result would be a technological “singularity,” a “rupture in the fabric of human history” beyond which seemingly any possibility becomes inevitable, including “immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that

expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.” He expanded on these ideas in a later book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), which became a seminal text for the technofetishist community that saw itself inventing the future the book described. Among many questionable line graphs, this tome includes a formal illustration of the Law of Accelerating Returns, relating “technology” to “time,” the former following an exponentially increasing curve along the latter. The graph raises several interpretive questions—e.g., what are the boundaries of “technology”? What does it mean for it to “increase”? (And what could it possibly mean for it to “decrease”?) But the implication is clear: buckle up, the future will come faster, and the signs are everywhere if you only care to look.

For these fantastical futures to exist demands a break with the past. The authenticity many seek in chatbots is also what Drouet’s contemporaries sought in her: some evidence that the object was “made” by something other than an adult “person.” Missing from most discussions, however, is the fact that these chatbots are most decidedly records of human intervention. They are “fast” in that they produce responses to a prompt quickly, but this outcome requires billions of human-created examples and untold hours of programming, and will require untold more if their responses are to improve—if we can even agree on what it would mean to do so.

Yann LeCun, the head of Meta’s AI Research lab and a pioneer of the machinelearning techniques that support many of the recent headline-grabbing demonstrations, recently pointed out in a thread of posts on the social media website X

that the immense amount of information required for language models to produce text at even their current level is vastly greater than that encoded in human DNA or to which a child is exposed in the first several years of their life. He concludes that the analogy to human learning is fundamentally flawed. And he is not the first to make this observation: Professor Iris van Rooij and her colleagues have mathematically proven that, to achieve the quality of human learning, such machines would require vastly more data than has been thrown at them already—indeed, quite possibly more than could ever exist. Where will all this new data come from?

A flurry of recent changes in privacy policies suggests that surveillance will continue to expand in order to feed these machines, allowing them to generate ever more personalized reflections. At the same time, businesses looking to cut labor costs have adopted these technologies to rapidly produce public-facing text and images that now litter the web, and which are already beginning to dramatically reduce the quality of search results. It’s possible that a coming generation of these chatbots may be trained in large part on the output of its predecessors—an ouroboros of asymptotic mediocrity.

When most people talk about language models, they don’t know about these constraints and caveats, and so can be forgiven for hallucinating an animating force behind the seeming flood of de novo content. But for the technorati orchestrating the production, there may be something altogether more simplistic, less sublimated, driving this discourse. Predictably, the production cycle of language machines has become a site of contestation for

oligarchs who stand to benefit. One head of this hydra is the array of large corporations that choose to avoid labor regulations by exploiting armies of low-wage, mainly offshore workers to perform the laborious instruction needed to shape language models into passable conversation partners. These laborers are in some cases paid the equivalent of two dollars an hour to screen the (often horrific) raw output of the machines and nudge them towards the sensibilities of “mainstream” society (a feat of externality redistribution that would make Summers proud). The fact that this training even needs to be performed in order not to reveal an ugly mirror of our society is rarely discussed directly—except by right-wing billionaires who appeal to the culture wars and lament that the machines are being “restricted” in their ability to generate “truth.” Though described as opposites—“doomers” versus “accelerationists”—both parties are seeking the same goal: the automation of human labor. Where they appear at odds is, as ever, only at the point of presentation.

Barthes, summarizing the mania over Minou, wrote that the “bourgeois notion of the child prodigy (Mozart, Rimbaud, Roberto Benzi) [is] an admirable object insofar as it fulfills the ideal function of all capitalist activity: to gain time, to reduce human duration to a numerative problem of precious moments.” Never mind that Drouet, as the magazine Elle reported, “does not know the meaning of words used in her poems” since, according to Barthes, “[t]he more a poem is stuffed with ‘formulas,’ the more it passes for successful.” Let us be spared the analogous titillations surrounding language models and abandon the fantasy that the future will save us from the present.

ECHO, ECHO

Death, rebirth, and New Age music

by Peter Holslin

Confined to the soft leather La-Z-Boy recliner, I switched on the television and let time slip away.

I partook in this ritual every time I visited my father at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the final years of his life. He lived in a three-bedroom, Tuscany-meets-Southwest rambler plunked in the middle of a suburban subdivision on the west side of the Rio Grande. The neighborhood was filled with working-class families, retirees, and beefy military types who drove around in lifted trucks and had barking dogs patrol their backyards. Beyond the perimeter of Montecito Estates, there were prehistoric

escarpments and basalt rock formations for miles, all colored some shade of tan. Walking to a nearby grocery store or coffee shop was out of the question; I’d have to drive 15 minutes down winding roads toward the strip malls of Coors Boulevard.

The sun was ruthless during the summer, the heat radiating off the abundant concrete. Snow fell in winter, and spring was a time of seasonal allergies and uncanny congestion. My dad grew up in the 1960s on a farm in Minnesota, so I imagine the isolation made him feel nostalgic, maybe even liberated. For me, it was suffocating. Sinking into that La-Z-Boy, I could feel my body atrophy, my critical faculties dull. This seemed to be the kind of aspirationally anonymous “Suburban Home” that California punk band Descendents paid tribute to in their classic album Milo Goes to College: “I don’t want no hippie pad / I want a house just like Mom and Dad.” The television was enormous.

My dad had a subscription to DirecTV. During the pandemic days, between doctors’ appointments, after he got his fill of antiTrump coverage on CNN, he would switch to a channel called Soundscapes. There were no shows on this channel—no visuals at all, in fact. Soundscapes was devoted entirely to ethereal New Age music. Most of the tracks were long and meandering, consisting of sustained synthesizer chords, dreamy drone tones, and gentle acoustic instruments: woodwinds and gongs drifting over field recordings of nature. I watched—listened—with fascination. I didn’t recognize any of the artists whose names appeared on the screen, except for Enya, but it occurred to me that who they were didn’t really matter. In the world of Soundscapes, individualism dissolved into

a bed of clouds. But for all the evocation of organic naturescapes, the music seemed suburbanized in its inoffensive, indistinct use of open space.

My instinct was to recoil. To be sure, Soundscapes represented the opposite of the DIY music I grew up on—punk and indie rock that prized chaos over calm, catharsis over quietude. I didn’t realize until later that many New Age artists had fomented their own form of DIY liberation, defying market trends with a mission of inner calm propagated through underground networks of home studios and private-press labels.

Something has changed in me since those days on the La-Z-Boy. Over the past few years, I’ve immersed myself in all kinds of placid, unstructured, atmospheric music. My playlists have become overpopulated with Japanese environmental tracks and Brian Eno’s “ambient” albums. My shelves have filled up with New Age cassettes, ambient records, and books about “open music”—the term musician and author David Toop uses to describe genres like ambient and New Age in his 1995 book Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds. I’ve also amassed a small collection of New Age–ready instruments like gongs, flutes, synthesizers, and drum machines, using them to create recordings with no discernible hooks, no apparent structure, and no market intention. Moving through waves of grief, feeling adrift in the world, I’ve been drawn to New Age’s boundlessness, its special way of releasing the listener from expectation.

Of course, I’m hardly the only one to embrace New Age lately—as OutKast’s André 3000 made clear in New Blue Sun, his debut solo album that dropped last year,

in which he traded his usual rap verses for wooden flutes and MIDI wind controllers. The heaviness of our times, the looming specters of sickness and dying, the obsolescence of classic rockist assumptions in the critical sphere—these are all things that seem to have forced a reckoning in American critical taste. My own reappraisal of New Age has revealed a surprising truth about the magic a listener can find on these seemingly meaningless sonic wanderings.

•

It’s easy to resort to cliché when defining New Age music. Critics call it sonic wallpaper, Muzak, elevator music, or hippiedippie bullshit. Steven Halpern, a Grammynominated luminary of New Age, offers a more thorough definition in his fascinating foreword to Patti Jean Birosik’s 1989 compendium, The New Age Music Guide. Over two comprehensive pages, he outlines the genre’s basic elements, including consonant harmony, the absence of rhythmic pulse, and the generous use of effects like reverb and delay. Maybe the most striking feature is the use of melody, or the intentional misuse of it, as a New Age track is supposed to be shorn of hooks and easy to forget. “Even after repeated listenings, most people cannot remember the sequence of sounds in these works,” he writes. “When we eliminate the straitjacket of predetermined patterns, we open up new ways of organizing and experiencing sound for ourselves.”

In his foreword, Halpern emphasizes the importance of the music’s connection to the wider New Age movement, specifically to holistic healing practices like yoga and meditation. The way he puts it, a New Age artist has to be more than just a talented musician—they also have to

be in a balanced “vibrational” state at the critical moment when they sit down to record. Traditional show-business models of virtuosity and spectacle have no business here; by design, New Age is more about centeredness and mental health. “We react differently to music an artist plays from a state of balance and love,” Halpern writes, “than to sound arising from a wish to glorify the ego, or, worse, from anxiety.”

In Ocean of Sound, Toop identifies 1889 as a significant year marking the emergence of the music that would eventually come to be tagged under categories like ambient and New Age. That’s the year French composer Claude Debussy attended the Exposition Universelle in Paris, a colonial exhibition where he first encountered a range of folk-music styles from Southeast Asia. At one performance Debussy is said to have attended, a Javanese ensemble played suling flute, bowed rebab, and some kind of metallophone (an instrument that produces sound through metal pieces like bars, tubes, or bowls) while accompanied by the “slow, eerie grace” (Toop’s words) of a bedhaya dance troupe. Toop, long regarded as an authority on ambient and experimental music, suggests that this was an early example of Western fascination with Indonesian gamelan, a musical tradition whose gong instruments would later captivate influential composers like Colin McPhee and Steve Reich. Toop makes an effort to draw a link between Debussy’s 1889 moment and his later works of aquatic-themed Impressionism—it’s one of many wishy-washy, not-totally-convincing thematic connections he makes throughout a book that is itself deeply impressionistic.

Still, the very fact of Debussy’s encounter may be significant, at least symbolically.

For better and worse, New Age has often played out as an interface of “East” meeting “West.” On countless New Age playlists, LPs, CDs, and cassettes (that otherwise outdated format being especially popular among genre enthusiasts), you can hear European and North American artists appropriating music from elsewhere for their own ends, blithely overlooking the power imbalances of colonialism and global capitalism as they revel in a distinct idiom of representations, (mis)interpretations, and Orientalist tropes. This approach is one of many postmodern elements that contribute to New Age’s deliberately chilled-out vibe, lending it an atmospheric weightlessness that can also come across as intellectually hollow.

The New Age Music Guide, a collection of hundreds of mini-profiles of New Age artists, credits jazz clarinetist Tony Scott as the first artist to put out a proper New Age record. Released in 1964, Scott’s Music for Zen Meditation teams him with Japanese koto maestro Shinichi Yuize and shakuhachi flutist Hōzan Yamamoto to set a serene mood through a remarkable exploration of slow pacing and open space. Scott recorded the album after an extended stay in Japan, where he learned about Zen monks and studied Japanese classical music in between gigs that spanned the country and private excursions even deeper into the region. With its glacial tempos, Japanese scales, and a reed instrument (the clarinet) that had fallen out of vogue in jazz, Music for Zen Meditation represented not only a radical break from entrenched tenets of the genre but also a departure from the then-emerging free-jazz and post-bop movements. The album also happens to be an excellent tool for literal Zen meditation.

No surprise, then, that it ended up a hit, selling 500,000 copies within a few years and setting the template for New Age releases to come.

During the Age of Aquarius in the 1960s and ’70s, plenty of other musicians “opened their minds” to New Agey artistic approaches. Synthesizers, sequencers, tape loops, and effects units broke previous molds on music-making: among the advantages was “unlimited sustain at the flick of a switch,” as Halpern explains, allowing for infinitely wider vistas of experimentation and exploration to come into view. The rising popularity in the United States and Europe of sounds like Indian raga, Pakistani Qawwali, and Indonesian gamelan also helped reshape the relationship between artist and audience. Toop writes that the marathon-length performances of gamelan could shift a listener’s priorities: “[I]ntense focus, even a literal entrancement, could be alternated with peripheral listening, eating, drinking, or, ultimately, sleep.”

In at least one case, inspiration came as a result of the vulnerability brought on by convalescence. Music journalist Geeta Dayal, writing in Another Green World (2009), a book about Brian Eno’s 1975 album of the same name, relates an anecdote about how Eno came up with the idea for ambient music while recovering from being hit by a taxi. He’d just returned from the hospital to his home in London when his friend Judy Nylon stopped by, carrying a tape of 18th-century harp music she had just bought. As Nylon tells it in an interview, the famed songwriter was in a miserable state, stuck in bed in a drab room: “The room was grey, the carpet was grey, the light was grey.” After she put on the tape,

the two started fiddling with the volume, realizing that the sound of the delicate instrumentals could be EQ’d so as to find a tranquil balance with the sound of rain pouring outside. “This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience,” Eno later wrote of this aha moment.

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While different in many respects, Ocean of Sound and The New Age Music Guide both adopt nonnarrative formats that emphasize the unstructured nature of “open music” genres like ambient and New Age. Ocean of Sound is packed with freewheeling insights and endless references to artists, and I’ve found that its lack of coherence makes the book an effective sleeping aid. The New Age Music Guide’s mini-profiles, meanwhile, lump together a disparate collection of key musical figures—including avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, Yellow Magic Orchestra co-founder Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Miami Vice soundtrack scorer Jan Hammer—under a ludicrous array of subcategories (“New Age Traditional,” “New Age Sound Health,” “New Age Space”).

As I read these books, I found myself veering back and forth between curiosity and suspicion. Free-improv analysis can be liberating, but it can also be dangerous. It’s cool to be chill and go with the flow, but you should wonder where the current is coming from, and where the flow eventually leads.

New Age practices can bring about deep healing and positivity, but they’ve also been known to promote anti-intellectual, conspiracy-minded thinking, weakening

peoples’ defenses against nefarious forces like fascism. New York Times critic Ben Ratliff pinpoints a central concern about New Age and New Age–adjacent music in an interview for the 2021 documentary Listening to Kenny G. Speaking about G’s smooth-jazz tune “Going Home,” Ratliff says that the “calming effect” of the instrumental’s synth-pad reveries and soprano-sax lamentations has the power to “reduce people’s desire to resist things or cause trouble.” In China, “Going Home” has been used for years in malls and other businesses to signal to shoppers that the doors are closing for the night—in much the same way that G and others have been deployed in American malls, waiting rooms, and customer-service hold lines. “Is Kenny G’s music a weapon of consent?” Ratliff wonders.

Still, it would be unfair to single out New Age as the only kind of music capable of brainwashing the masses. As if to preemptively counter Ratliff’s argument, Halpern posits in The New Age Music Guide that it is, in fact, the strong melody of pop music that makes listeners suggestible in ways they never expected. He makes a smart case for New Age’s subversive side, as its open structure and emphasis on mood over melody push against the preconceived assumptions built into most peoples’ listening habits. “Indeed, we’ve all been culturally conditioned to respond to particular patterns in sound,” he writes, “whether we are aware of it or not!”

Looking for a third opinion, I recently cued up an episode of Music of Mind Control, a weekly show on New Jersey’s WFMU radio station devoted to the music of cultist movements. I expected a healthy dose of creepy New Age fare, and host Micah

Moses certainly delivered by kicking things off with a New Age–leaning track—a group chanting “Thank you very much!” in eerie unison over synth drones, chimes, and seagull sounds. But Moses soon switched things up. He recently spoke to CultStories. com about how cult music tends to be imitative of popular genres, but in a way that “doesn’t quite pass muster” because it’s often so poorly produced or pandering. On his show, he spun two trainwreck attempts at country-western music by Tuaca Kelly, a “truth-targeting vocational reality voyager” based in Amsterdam. There was also a batch of cheerful if slightly bizarre psychedelic folk from 1972 by a band promoting the creator of Transcendental Meditation. And, most entertaining of all, the Hearts Center Community dished out some keyboard-orchestra waltzes and jaunty choral numbers that could’ve been the score to a Pixar movie about Heaven’s Gate. •

My father was most definitely not a holistichealing guy. A nuclear physicist by profession, he was a proud atheist with a logical mind. But New Age music soothed him. He was sensitive to loud noises and bass, and for years was wary whenever I started tuning the radio dial while riding with him in the car, lest I turn on something too intense like punk rock or hip-hop or techno. We finally found our musical connection one day in the middle of the pandemic. I had just dropped the needle on my new copy of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s 1982 album Music for Nine Post Cards when I got a call from him. As we talked on the phone, delicate electric piano tones emanated from my home speakers, and although the volume was low, it was loud enough for

him to hear. He paused. “Oh, what is that?” he said. “It sounds nice.”

At his home in Albuquerque, he’d adopted a new bedtime ritual—as close to a spiritual practice as I ever saw him doing. He would spend several minutes in the bathroom applying eye drops and taking a range of medicines, and would then climb into his enormous California King bed. He kept his iPhone charging on his nightstand, and he would cue up a New Age playlist to help him drift off to sleep. Back in the living room, I would sit in the leather La-ZBoy and watch TV. I kept the volume low as I listened to the synthesizer drones and soothing acoustic instrumentals billowing from his room, like stray tendrils from a vape pen. The music came courtesy of artists like Steve Roach, known for instrumental pieces that stretch out and blend together in ways that evoke vast landscapes and dream-time journeys.

One afternoon last March, about a year and a half after my father died, his beloved Soundscapes channel echoed back to me during a journey of my own. I was on a trip to Lebanon with a couple of friends, and we were racing up a mountain in a rental car with hopes of catching one of the last rides of the day on the Teleferique, a gondola lift that offers beautiful views of the Mediterranean coastline. We had gotten a late start and kept getting distracted by things on the side of the road, so we arrived at our destination right as the Teleferique was closing for the day. But we forgot our cares as a glorious bevy of synth drones beckoned to us from beyond a gated entryway.

Soon, we found ourselves gazing upwards at Our Lady of Lebanon, a Maronite Christian shrine to the Virgin

Mary. Standing on a mountain peak over 2,000 feet above sea level, the statue of Mary towers atop a 65-foot-tall stone base, into which is built a small chapel. Nearly 30 feet tall, painted all white, Mary holds her hands out to her sides in a gesture of mercy.

As tourists and other casual visitors strolled around, looking out on Jounieh Bay and posing for pictures, a smaller assortment of worshipping pilgrims found spots to stand along the spiral steps leading up to Our Lady. I speak Arabic and have been to Lebanon several times, but I had no idea where I was, nor the significance of the shrine I was now visiting. I assumed, ignorantly, that everyone had found their perch on the steps simply to get a better look at the views and to snap pictures. But they were all quiet, serious, focused on prayer and reflection. The sun began to set, and those deep, murmuring electronics piped over the PA system. Sustained chords quietly drifted over the area, helping create an ambience of spiritual concentration. The music, if you could even call it music, was like a thin layer of fog, or the slow dimming of sunlight at dusk: there and not there, beautiful but nonintrusive, part of the environment in the same way that low-volume harp pluckings became a part of Eno’s environment back in 1975.

I often wondered what my dad thought about in quiet moments of alone time during the last months and days of his life. He became deeply reflective in his later years, and I gathered that he was making peace with things, reflecting on what he had accomplished in life, and maybe wondering where the next step into the great beyond would take him. The world of Soundscapes clearly helped make that a peaceful journey for him—as it has done for me ever since.

On the mountain in Lebanon, the sweeping vistas of sound were washing over me, creating an unexpected moment of surreal beauty. My focus shifted, and shifted again. The muscles in my neck relaxed. I was in a place I had never been to before, but it all felt familiar, and I thought about how much I missed my dad.

Bettina Untitled (1960s) Oil on canvas 30 × 30 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

INVENTED JEWISH FOLKTALES

Excerpt of Yr Dead forthcoming from McSweeney’s & Daunt in 2024.

by Sam Sax

In the absence of inherited stories, the following are what a father invents to tell his child before bed. Cobbled together from eradicated histories, from a family line that ends one generation back with a drunk, these stories needle in the space between truth and fact, between the authenticity of feeling and the fiction of history.

In a town called Zloknovia, in what is modern day Kaunas, there was a baby born unlike any child the town had ever seen. His hair was white as a clean sheet of paper against the dark features of his face. All the child seemed to do was eat. How sweet, his parents first thought. What a strange child we’ve got! It was only after sucking his mother dry of milk within the first weeks that they grew concerned. She ached with the weight of being emptied too quick, and they moved him on to solid foods, which he, too, devoured with abandon. One hundred mashed figs a day. Then on to root vegetables, a barrel of turnips and radishes he gummed to an ugly pulp. By his second month, he’d bankrupted the family, and they began begging the surrounding towns for donations, which he promptly demolished under his appetite. Goats began disappearing from fields. Whole families of crows vanished from the sky. Upon the boy’s first birthday, the region fell into a great famine. After starving themselves for a year, his parents, not knowing what else to do, sent their boy on a ship to America, and it is unclear whether he made it or not.

•

In a small village formally known as Bhlikovta, men in uniforms came to tell the people their village wasn’t a village anymore. The men used fire to make this point and, from out of the village, a writer was cast into the winter roads alongside the rest of his neighbors. As they walked through unending darkness, his neighbors asked him to recount their life in Bhlikovta, to build it back for them in words. They said, tell us about the creek where we used to pretend we were spawning fish, tell us about the fields where we buried our dogs.

I’m a writer, the writer replied, I can’t speak back to you what was as if it is, but rather can only record it for you once it is gone, to offer an isness that isn’t is anymore, do you understand? At this reply, his neighbors found themselves quite annoyed, wanting only their dinner tables back, the floors they birthed their children on, the places they sang in joy and in pain. They wanted the writer to write a reprieve for their suffering, to take them away from the stabbing cold in their feet. After weeks of journeying, when eventually the whole village abandoned the writer to his walking, scattering across neighboring towns that had yet to be unpersoned, the writer sat down at a child’s desk in a bombed-out primary school and began writing. He recorded first all the particulars of a life in objects, no ideas, only things, pages and pages of cutlery, of scarves, and of shovels, and one by one each common noun appeared around him. After building this blueprint of his gone village, in a shaky hand, he followed with this: I did not have a home, until it was gone from me. •

This happened in a small town outside of what is now Minsk. There was a boy who moved to study at yeshiva and spent all his days reading. All his days, the boy was in deep conversation with dead scholars; all his days, he transcribed only what had previously been said. Word for word, their language moved through his hand. He surrounded himself with the words of only the holiest men. He was, after all, apprenticing himself to holiness. Every day, between his dormitory and the school, he’d pass a boy around his age begging for food. The boy was just like him, aside from being

bedraggled and gallowed by hunger that left him with no time for the study of language. Every day, the learned boy passed by the other, offering the occasional crust of bread. This story doesn’t end how you’d like it to. The begging boy wasn’t god, waiting to impart a critical lesson, or to allocate a station. No. One day on his way to school, the begging boy took a knife and slit the learned boy’s throat from ear to ear, escaping with his little money and his satchel of food. The dead boy’s papers caught the wind and were carried off into the rivers and waved there in the branches like new leaves. Holier than scripture, this lesson tells of what any lord will not do when some have not.

•

This happened in a town called Shoflet. The town lay just south of a lake where every day the people would make the several-mile-long pilgrimage to water, lower their heads to drink, and then struggle back with filled buckets. The water was still clear then—god had not yet seen what humans were capable of. The villagers lived where they lived and loved their neighbors. They would share the food they grew, share the animals they butchered, and all was well. Only one day, when it was hot as tehom, the knife used to slice the goat’s throat had not been properly blessed, and the animal cried out in such excruciating pain when it died that the blood of everyone in the surrounding towns began to curdle inside them. There was a meeting to determine what was to be done to the butcher, to the rabbi who slept through his blessing, to the knife itself; and all the while, the goat meat rotted out in the field, so slowly did the bureaucracy of law move. Eventually they

buried the knife, desanctified the rabbi, and fined the butcher. Even so, where the goat died, a darkness spread over the land, and all the grasses turned bleach-white, its sacrifice for naught. The blood fed back into the soil and made the soil die. Death soon spread to the sea and the families invented a system of money by which to trade their goods. God so wept when he saw this, he cursed the water to salt. When the villagers came back to drink, their throats pickled, their children learned to float.

•

At the edge of a wood that lay between two ragged settlements on what is the modern Iberian Peninsula, there was a well. But the well drew only brackish water, as the elders would tell it, so the children of the town were instructed not to drop a bucket down below, and were warned of the kind of sickness that would spread inside the bodies of those who drank. One day, there was a young boy from a farther-off town traveling through the wood, carrying a stack of books for Rabbi Moyshanka in a shoddy wagon behind him. He was traversing the tough terrain through the woods, rightly assuming this would be a shorter path between villages, when he came upon the well. Not knowing the stories, he lowered the bucket and pulled up the most crystalline cold water he’d ever seen. Water they write poems about. Water so clear it might as well be sky. It was only after he brought the bucket to his lips that he noticed how dark it had grown around him, how the trees appeared to be stone, how his feet were deep in mud and the only light was a thin coin suspended above him. Though it was dark, the boy could tell he was not alone. His body moved as if it were below

water. There were thousands of boys there, skin bloated and no longer opaque. All looking up, waiting for someone to lower the bucket into their open mouths, so thirsty to be brought back up into the light.

•

This happened in a village near what is today Utena. Every winter, the nights would grow longer than a sentence spoken by a grandmother turning soup. It wasn’t clear whether time had lost its sense or if god had simply fled the village for better weather. The temperature dropped low as a field mouse trembling in the undergrowth, hiding from owls. Every winter, the village boys, one by one, would stand guard with a lantern on the high wooden outpost, beside them a bell and a knife. Each boy’s mother would wrap a cooked fish in newsprint for him to eat. Were he to see anything coming from the wood, he was meant to ring the bell and cast his blade into the darkness to keep the darkness at bay. Most nights, nothing. But every awful once in a while would come a ringing from the blackness followed by a scream, and this heaviness would drag its muttering lashes and sobbing wind past their windows. The village would wake the next day to an empty outpost as the next boy would be asked to step into that covenant. Some winters, no boys were taken. Other years, six. Come spring, the town would assemble to etch the names of children into the walls of their synagogue, and for a time these names protected those who prayed inside. And this is how it was, season after season, until one spring soldiers came from the capital with their railroad. The village became a place between cities. The railroad brought milk, and wool, and strangers. The

strangers came with computing machines, with crucifixes carved from pig bone, with novel illnesses, and with knives shaped like genitals. And all was good, as the people of the village marveled at their new prosperity, drinking thick bone broth at every meal. Many winters passed without incident beneath their new electric lamps. And under this illumination, the boys grew proud and cruel, gathering in packs like dogs. They were blood clotting in the streets. Everyone suffered when they passed. It wasn’t until the government collapsed and the railroad failed and there wasn’t enough to eat that blame came back hungry to the village. When winter returned, it remained dark all year. Dark as the inside of a crow’s egg. Dark as stones in the place of eyes. Amphibious dark. Rat-jizz dark. Cataclysm dark. When daylight finally returned, it found the village empty as a bell with its tongue cut out. The grounds were covered in fish bones. The synagogue, knifed through with our names.

Bettina Mass Levitation. Concrete Space. Where Space Becomes Matter, Matter Becomes

Volume (1965-75)

Marble

15 × 4 × 4 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

PLAYBOY

Forthcoming from Semiotext(e) April 9, 2024

by Constance Debré

I show my card to security. I get a coffee from the machine. I smoke a cigarette. I put my lawyer’s robe on. A friend tells me about the case he’s working on. A court clerk says hi to me. Some tourists coming out of Sainte-Chapelle ask me, Where are the toilets?

I hope they enjoy the shit stains and the graffiti on the wall that says Arabs Suck Cock. I’m from the upper class, in case that much wasn’t already clear. We even have a few duchesses on my mother’s side of the family. That’s why I speak like this. It’s how aristocrats speak. They love it. I love it too. What you can’t hear is the snobby accent. Which I also have, apparently. It might be because we’re

all bored shitless, the whole upper class, more bored than others, that we speak like this. Just as bored as poor people. Really poor people. The ones from the projects and everywhere else. So we take it out on words. It lightens things up while we wait around for something to happen. I push open the padded door to the courtroom. The court usher’s a good-looking guy. Not only is he a fag, he’s also an Arab. Makes a change from the usual token hires. He lets me go first. I defend my client. Hash dealer, drug trafficking. If you can call that a dealer. If you can call that trafficking. I take my time pleading the case. I go up to the witness stand. The judges listen to me. I get even closer. It’s not pleading. It’s telling them what they want to hear. Good guy. Good school. Good family. The prosecutor is only calling for a suspended sentence. Judges go out on a limb for the middle class. That’s how I met Agnès. I was defending her son. Of course he got off. Middle-class people never do time.

People don’t call me madame, they call me maître. I do a man’s job where you wear a robe. It even comes with this phallic necktie called a band that you can fiddle with in court. The robe doesn’t usually look good on women. They’re too short. Not me. Plus, black is a good color. The white band makes me look like an old Spanish aristocrat. I even get a sash with ermine along the hem. Actually, it’s rabbit. But it still makes you look rich. The job suits me fine. No one sees my dirty jeans under the robe, no one wonders where I am if I’m not in the office, no one answers back when I’m pleading a case, no one monitors what I do, what I think, what I say. I like the guilty parties, the pedophiles, thieves, rapists, armed robbers, murderers. It’s innocent people and

victims I don’t know how to defend. It’s not the fact that they’re guilty that fascinates me, it’s seeing how low a man can stoop. Without even saying a word. Without even flinching. It takes a special kind of courage to get that low. It’s not enough to have had a miserable childhood, alcoholic parents, or to be poor with no prospects. Granted, it’s a good start, but it’s not enough. I like them, but I like them at arm’s length. I’m not here to save them. If they get twenty years, that’s not my problem. If they’ve had horrific childhoods and they end up dying in filthy prisons, that’s not my problem. I’m just like everyone else, I’m here to get my pound of flesh. They have their lives, I have mine. I take a look and then I leave them in their squalor. I have my own. It’s not as serious but it’s no better. The important thing is to defend them well. And I do defend them well. It’s not that hard. It’s one of the few things I know how to do. That, and driving, I guess. There’s nothing else, really. I don’t think it’s that big a deal. I don’t think it’s that important to know how to do things. Obviously it’s not the best job. If anything, it’s mediocre. But at least I escaped office life, at least I don’t have a boss, at least I earn decent money. I’ve always had a problem with money. Earning it stresses me out. It’s only when I’m poor and the bailiffs are on my ass that I feel like I’m where I belong.

Phenomenological New York (1970s)

Gelatin silver print (printed by Bettina) 9 3/4 × 6 1/4 inches

Courtesy Ulrik. Credit: Stephen Faught

Bettina

AUNT JELENA

by

Marina Gudelj, translated by Ena Selimović

In his review of Marina Gudelj’s debut short story collection Fantomska bol (“Phantom Pain,” 2020), Kruno Lokotar describes the flares the stories set off while staging the everyday dramas (and traumas) of village life on the Dalmatian coast that surface without so much as a spark—like “an intangible limb, a self-alienation, an amputation from the fullness of life itself.”

Running just over 30,000 words, the 16 stories collected in Fantomska bol are not wanting for voice despite their brevity. Gudelj’s characters—largely women of various generations, who are diversely related— have a certain energy, call it spunk or charm, spirit or feminism. The challenges, then, of translating the stories speak to the strengths of the writing: the variety of dialects (prevalent among them, local variations of Croatian in Dalmatia, which has a history of being a semicolonial region of the French, Venetian, and Ottoman empires), the distinctness of each narrating voice, and the conciseness of the prose.

While Gudelj’s work has not gone unnoticed by award nominations, “Aunt Jelena” is only the second piece to appear in English translation, following the 2022 publication of her short story “The Witch” in Turkoslavia Journal

And this little story speaks—screams—for itself.

—Ena Selimović

Aunt Jelena

Lately I have trouble telling apart funerals from other, happier gatherings. The family arriving after a long journey. Friends, acquaintances, and, huddled in some corner, the oldest of the crew, triumphantly outliving the rest. The obligatory chatter of catching up.

“Jelena was by her side when she departed,” my mother whispers from one acquaintance to another, as though she’d been at the bedside herself.

“What can you do when sickness grabs holda ya …” says one of the ancients.

“How many times you say it came back? Five, six?”

“Two,” my mother says and heads

toward me. She presses me to her chest and says: “She’s at rest, now you can rest too.” She doesn’t release me from her embrace, and her thoughts tighten around me. She wants to say: “Now you can come back to us.”

“She suffer a lot?” someone throws in. Everyone falls silent. Having a front-row seat to death, now that was worth something. I wriggle out of my mother’s arms, ready to respond, but quickly change my mind: I want to say that she didn’t, to soften her dying, keep up this charade, then return to my aunt’s apartment and sit in the chair beside her empty bed.

Instead I say: “Every day she begged me to spare her suffering.”

That was true. When the illness confined her to bed, when all that was left of her was a skeleton cellophaned in skin, every day she begged me to kill her. She insisted that the end seemed longer than life itself, and that it wasn’t fair. I considered it. As the days wore on and her skin became more transparent, I began to see it as a merciful gesture rather than an act of killing.

“And did you?” someone ventured from the far end of the table. My mother was out of sight, but I felt her knees go weak. The others were shifting in place, making the sign of the cross.

Aunt Jelena was my mother’s younger sister. Grandma Marica, their mother, was a diligent, anxious, ugly woman. Her genes had in their totality been passed on to my own mother, as though they’d had to move on, possess their next inheritor, piss on their territory. And just as thoroughly, as if satisfied by their prior performance, they’d passed over Aunt Jelena, allowing her a serenity and beauty unknown to our family.

I was born a few days before my grandfather Marko’s death. Until then, Aunt Jelena had lived under the thumb of her parents and sister. She’d fought to satisfy their diligent nature and dedicated herself to housework on top of an eighthour workday. She bent to the will of her hard-working, parent-approved, long-term boyfriend.

My mother later regretted naming me after Aunt Jelena. She worried that, with her name, I would inherit everything Aunt Jelena had inside her. I always fantasized that my birth had set her free. As though by taking the name I’d lifted all expectations from her and transferred them to myself, the name like a rejected organ, transplanted, in some sort of faux medical experiment, to test if it might serve someone else.

It wasn’t until I started school that I met my namesake. Before that, I knew of her. I feared her like other children feared the bogeyman. For the gravest childish offenses, I’d be told I was just like her. But since she failed to appear at any of our family gatherings, by some childish reasoning I reached the conclusion that she was as unreal as a witch or Santa Claus.

My mother anxiously tracked every change in me. She stopped brushing my hair when my first golden locks darkened. My round face grew elongated, and my movements lost their compulsion. The name was catching up with me. Jelena snuck outside magic’s shadow and took shape in words invented for the needs of reality: Spendthrift. Traitor. It was then that I began to believe in her existence.

Once, I mustered the courage to ask my mother where this Jelena was.

“Don’t talk nonsense!” she snapped with the full-body tremor that seizes old village women at the mention of the devil. It’s forbidden to talk about her, you are not to tempt fate. God, Satan, and Jelena were not to be mentioned, and their names were to be abbreviated at all times as on Glagolitic monuments.

Then I calmed my grandmother with an album filled with photographs of my mother and Aunt Jelena posing together on the beach holding ice cream cones, or wearing kooky children’s glasses, or with cotton candy covering half their faces. In those early pictures, my mother was almost unrecognizable, not simply because she was a child, but because she had none of the anguish so striking in photographs of her in adolescence. Aunt Jelena, with her long dark hair, wearing a blouse that tied at the waist and a dress whose hem rose far above her knees, seemed to be pulling my meek mother into the frame, and it appeared as though my mother had agreed, but only for an instant—she’d soon bolt off, fleeing for solitude, far from the shared blood that pumped through their unmatched bodies.

I discovered, after Grandpa Marko died, that Aunt Jelena and my mother had inherited the old family vacation home. Jelena sold her share, quit her job, broke up with the boyfriend who’d won everyone’s approval, and set off with some grimy, paint-smeared artist. The family later caught wind of them in newspapers. The artist had apparently caught a break and was living off his brushes. When Jelena sold her share in the house, her branch of the rather hideous family oak was cut off. No one heard anything from her until a phone call from the artist ruined my mother’s 45th birthday party. Aunt Jelena

was very ill. Some alien intruder was threatening to occupy her body. Grandma took pity on her and went to visit despite Jelena’s plea that no one come, to avoid the awful sight of her. My mother respected her wishes, only calling her once. When Aunt Jelena recovered and embarked on a long trip to an archipelago in the Southern Hemisphere, my mother said: “What a luxurious way to be ill.”

It was Aunt Jelena who eventually reached out to me. She would call and hang up unless I answered the phone. We didn’t meet until I was old enough to come and go from home as I pleased. I reveled in our covert meetings and in wandering through her art gallery while she finished work. I loved replacing my mother’s cooked lunches with a snack of pizza, and spending time with Aunt Jelena, which led me to question my very essence, the changeability of my nature, my hunger for the unknown, never served in our home. She’d won. Over the years, she became even stronger, even more inventive, surer in everything she did. Hard decisions she loved most of all. Making them seemed to rejuvenate her and cause her stolen beauty to flood every room she entered as though to spite my mother.

The greasy artist, my uncle Martin, was flattened by a stroke the day I started college. After the funeral, sparsely attended by our side of the family, I packed my things and moved in with Aunt Jelena. The last days of her life were like those first days after my uncle’s death. She was reliving his death, made all the worse because she’d died there once already, in that same bed whose sheets she hadn’t let me change for months, hurling a lamp at me if I so much as tried to take my uncle’s pillow, the bed

she left only for the bathroom. That bed from which she served me the truth.

She’d met Uncle Martin at some protest and fallen so in love that she detested those parts of her life that weren’t marked with his presence. He was a painter whose talent wasn’t easy to monetize, so Aunt Jelena used the profits from her share of the vacation home to buy a modest commercial space in the city center. The first few years, she and Martin lived there with a bed and a hot plate behind a partition. From that hole, in time, she created one of the most treasured galleries in the city. She pushed Martin to paint while she wrote articles about the brilliant artist, his success in New York, the soaring prices of his work, and, slipping in what was left of her profits from the vacation home, pitched them to newspapers. Once they were published, she organized an auction and made enough money to rent an apartment.

Uncle Martin transformed from a Sunday painter into a self-assured exhibitionist, the type who shouts his order before he’s even fully in the bar. He sparked the imagination of girls much younger than Aunt Jelena, but she loved him. She still felt like everything untouched by him was vapid. She knew about the sociology student he could barely stand to leave. That was how she came to her next hard decision. She fell ill. When he returned home one morning, he found her crying on the sofa with some made-up diagnosis of a fatal disease. She was treated in the best clinics, and Uncle Martin left her side only while she underwent treatment in the stark white room of a private clinic. He forgot about the student, forgot all the other women except the one whose feet he now massaged, the one he read Andrić to when

she felt unwell, the one he accompanied to the cinema to see an Eastern European film. After she made him love her again, Aunt Jelena requested new lab results to reflect a full recovery. No one revealed any of her lies, neither the bribed journalists nor the bribed doctors.

“Who likes talking money?” she asked me.

So really, Aunt Jelena was struck by illness only once. It took hold of her as intensely as Aunt Jelena took hold of life.

“I didn’t,” I answer those gathered at her funeral. I only spared her last hard decision.

(facing page)

Installation image of works by Simon Rippon and Michelle Lozano

Courtesy of the Artists at The Gate Collective

EXCERPTED FROM FIRST LIGHT CAConrad go ahead call me a child for asking is there no war somewhere instead of this daily butterfly fighting suck of fan blade you should break up is my only relationship advice on the way to slaughter pigs on truck pass deer with broken neck where love is merely an aferthought we must banish the intrusions or become them

“IN ORDER TO BE AWAY FROM THE SITE OF THE MURDER OF HER SON, TAMIR RICE, SAMARIA MOVED OUT OF HER CLEVELAND HOME AND INTO A HOMELESS SHELTER.” Remica Bingham-Risher

I would rather find a home that is no home.

I would rather sleep with mothers who understand losing.

I would go to a place with no ties.

I would bind nothing.

I would carry my daughter back to the belly or into the wide-mouth of _________.

I would find another  hard worn, unwanted bed.

I would tell the intake officer my house was near the park and it’s clear none of us were safe there.

I would be a disappearing act. I would not be our own winding sheet.

I would leave his things  in his room the way he left them. I’d take very little with me.

Title taken from “‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning’” by Claudia Rankine, published in The New York Times, June 22, 2015.

WIND ENOUGH TO BEND THESE TREES

Christopher Kondrich

Wind enough to bend these trees, chap my lips, is more than enough to move too much of the surface of the Southern Ocean aside, drawing up deep, ancient, and far

warmer water to replace it, more than enough to slip that water under the ice shelves of Antarctica, melting them from below, like a tablet of some sublingual medicine that stays solid but dissolves the tongue it is beneath. I breathe this wind, take enough of it in and hold it, feel my lungs complain.

It is impossible to pretend I don’t feel them, not to imagine the lungs of the world,

as we have come to call the Amazon, inside a body large enough to contain it, the 2 million square miles of rainforest

not our own, that should not be owned, that belong to no one. The magician David Blaine

once held his breath for 17 minutes on live television before being overtaken by his lungs, meaning they made him

come up for air. I remember holding my chest as he kept himself submerged, right hand gripping the scruff of my shirt, while under his wetsuit his intercostal muscles were aflame, spasming inside him. Not so much complaining, as giving an ultimatum—if he did not resurface, he would die, whatever it was he was trying to prove, it had gone on long enough.

THE OPEN DOOR

Chloe Martinez

I’ve been looking for ways to make it my fault. Parked too far from the curb. Picked the wrong parking spot. Wrong time, or day. Left the car door open too wide,

on a too-narrow street. Should have brought more flavors of ice cream for the kids’ playdate, and should have been waiting more patiently for danger, always. Truth is,

I felt fine. Parked well. Two flavors was plenty: even one would be ice cream, would be happiness.

The street was spacious, the door open a normal amount. A bright Saturday, and in the park nearby, a game of pickleball. Truth is, I should be furious

at the driver, who police later confirmed was drunk, but she missed me, she missed my children, and though she ripped through the edge of the open car door

right behind my soft back as I bent over Saafia’s car seat, unbuckling those tricky buckles, the door bending back like a branch as she passed, and though she wavered slowly down the street as I screamed, then with a deliberation that must have been panic but looked, from where I stood, almost thoughtful, turned the corner and kept going, she did not

so much as scratch us. Amina says she saw, from the sidewalk, the driver’s effort, swerving hard to avoid my body, and what depths that woman was swimming in then and probably now

I don’t know, but didn’t she swim up for a split second and didn’t she save me, a perfect stranger, and isn’t that a kind of miracle, really, a kind of victory?

THE SILENT BROTHER

Hermann

Burger translated by Daniele Pantano

I must still have a brother, who walks towards me on a street in shadows, somewhere during summer, somewhere in a green land, without speech, naked, with dark round lenses and hairy arms gone slack from angry gestures.

And he doesn’t recognize me, because he lost his mind, when he leaped from a trailing into waist-deep grass.

My speechless brother, you are not dead. Put on a green shirt, teach me your speechlessness, smile, if I don’t understand, let us say nothing together. But you don’t recognize me.

Like me a strange mother sent you into this world with a program of wishes, put you before her pride like an ox, and hurled her crown’s stony raisins at you. Your hoofbeats crush her prayer’s grinding mill.

My brother, my anti-blood, written into my flesh, when hard like a coin we were flung into this world, you lay face down. But you are not dead.

Printed with kind permission of Nagel & Kimche at Carl Hanser Verlag.

MESSAGE FOR JIM IN SYRIA

David Roderick

Any idiot can sing a song to the dead, and yet like the moon I’d like to appear once a month and sing to you in full-throated light— my voice pouring out to mourn you, my friend with no grave who died by a brutal hand. But a song like that, even if I was capable, would demand I dance with words equally near and far from your death, an act we were close enough to touch on our screens when it happened. On my phone I spun it back, let the earth’s shadow vanish the knife from the separatist’s hand, then farther back to eclipse the separatist himself, a man who falsely believed when he raised his blade he was giving birth to a kingdom. If I could reign over my own throat, if I could sing without crying and capture what you knew long before I did, that tragedy and farce mingle freely

in our lives, that action is the movement of the soul, I’d forgive my silence near this window watching the oak above my yard tremble, where the moon behind is a sign of my wholeness, of the wholeness I’m trying to sing.

THE BLUE MARBLE

Ghayath Almadhoun translated by Catherine Cobham

Damascus

Everything was throbbing with death, except death, which was still alive.

The war tiptoed in at night like a tender mother, to make sure we slept soundly, straightening our heads on sandbags as if they were feather pillows, covering our bodies in rubble so we didn’t catch cold, and trying to gather us into mass graves so we didn’t feel lonely.

While the world was silent as the grave, bombs were wiping the hard drive of the city’s memory, and reformatting the houses, and streets full of corpses were gradually being transformed into a state institution for the production of organic fertilizer.

Footnote 1:

What happens on this blue planet must remain on this blue planet. - - -

Arrival in the city of non-arrival

The security guard at the airport looks at my bag made of human skin, and fear shines like your eyes, which I remember well. The details that sadness has transformed into memories are hidden in a secret pocket in the suitcase like a shipment of cocaine, and the world is a blue apple as it appeared in the 1972 image of “The Blue Marble.” While my memory was the only evidence of the massacre, the present was falling like castles in front of the Romans and your voice, which came via satellite, was the only thing that did not turn into mere probability in an algorithm.

Mere probability in an algorithm, the earth looks like a dot in one of Georges Seurat’s paintings and the security man is thinking like a losing horse when he mutters the name of the place of birth on the passport: Damascus. And I’m thinking of the probabilities that made us meet on this planet, for you thought it was just a coincidence because God doesn’t exist as you say, while I thought it was God’s will, as it says in verse 30 of surat al-insan.

I think about the probabilities, how a man needs a woman so he can become wise enough to choose the lonely path, or to realize that all that

glitters is not gold, or to rearrange chaos in the form of a family that doesn’t live under the bombing, or to fear the idea that he doesn’t feel fear.

I think about the probabilities, how a woman stuck in the middle of this programmed winter, which can turn any simple grief into melancholia, can laugh like a wheat field in the Middle East, how a woman who has witnessed all this devastation can radiate warmth in the midst of this total darkness, in this northern North.

How a woman can be as obvious as occupation, as sad as Syria, and as beautiful as wishes.

Footnote 1:

On the way to the city, the road diverges, one road more enticing than the other, broad, made beautiful with trees, it feels safe, but it leads to the wolf, and the other remote, dark, lonely, full of roadblocks, but it goes to Damascus.

Footnote 2:

Damascus, before the wolf devoured it, resembled love, and we were strangers enough there to feel the security that prisoners feel when they’ve been in prison for a long time, and adapt to it. Just as everybody on this blue planet knows that Argentina is the only Italian country that speaks Spanish, and this is a scientific fact, so everybody also knows that Damascus is the only dead city in which there are living people, and that is a literary fact.

Footnote 3:

Istihbas, as Yassin al-Haj Saleh says, is what happens when the prisoner settles in prison and trains himself to live there, and relaxes as if he is at home, and time becomes his ally, so the basic function of prison is negated and the years there become like an organic phase of the prisoner’s life. - - -

Berlin

A barren woman gave birth to me, in the year of ID-card killings. My mother is a packet of powdered milk from UNESCO. My Arabic language is inlaid with electrons. I sleep soundly while my words roam free, under

the influence of drugs, and people stay awake in the bars of this city until morning.1

This city is a potential massacre, a postmodern mass grave, a concentration camp for millennial artists. It looks like my face in a fake passport photo, like my heart that can love you again, and sleep in your arms like a baby, my heart that can.

This city is as tight as a string on a musical instrument. How can a city as tight as a string give us the freedom of the Kurds in the mountains?

This city survived peace once, and war twice. It taught us how to protect the country from the men who protect the country, so we remembered Damascus, and whenever we remembered Damascus, we remembered the destruction, and when we remembered the destruction, we remembered Berlin.

Footnote 1:

In March 2067, Deutsche Bahn opened its new Berlin–Damascus line, with trains reaching speeds of 250 kilometers per hour. The train, with the customary calm of night trains, will cover a distance of 3700 kilometers per hour in 15 hours. It departs from Berlin at 5:00 in the evening and arrives in Damascus at 7:30 in the morning.

Footnote 2:

On a potential night train from Berlin to Damascus, emigrants will emigrate again, the dead will die again, and the garden that devours the rose now will still be devouring the rose until that moment.

Footnote 3:

- Why do people love Berlin?

- Because they haven’t seen Damascus.

- - -

1 Reference to a poem by al-Mutanabbi: I sleep contentedly as my words roam free while others restlessly argue and struggle to understand them.

PTSD

Look over there. Do you see that forest of intertwining buildings? It’s called the city, while the forest of bodies intertwining here is a dance party, or a potential mass grave.

Look further. Consider the wars that haven’t happened yet, think about the bombs that haven’t fallen, the bodies that haven’t decomposed under the rubble, the children who will grow up as if life is beautiful, in a happy, safe country.

You say that I survived the war. No, my dear, nobody survives wars. It’s only that I didn’t die. I just stayed alive.

Just stayed alive, while the house and the street and the neighborhood and the city and the country died. The sparrow, the lemon tree, the street cat, the neighbor’s dog died. The garden of the woman next door died and the woman next door and the corner café and the local mosque and the primary school and the teacher and everything. Everything died, and the primary school teacher’s voice kept echoing in my head: “It’s better to arrive late than not to arrive,” only for me to discover after many years of devastation that it’s usually better not to arrive at all.

Footnote 1:

This world is collapsing quietly, while you sleep deeply as if nothing had happened. The cities, from which we fled from our fleeing, are consuming our wooden memory like a blazing stove. If I were not touching your body now with this hand of mine, I wouldn’t have believed that we forget that we remember, and that the bombs falling on houses that became alien have become familiar, and that roads recoil in fear like a terrified animal, and the men who went out and didn’t return would never return, and the country that killed my brother would be found dead with a bullet in the head, and the world doesn’t call things by their names.

Footnote 2:

The world calls the war in Vietnam the Vietnam War, and the war in Iraq the Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan the Afghan War, and they are all American wars.

- - -

Love

Don’t be afraid of this night as thirsty as a burning forest, for my heart is drenched with memory. Don’t enter by the narrow gate, and don’t close possibilities behind you. The song does not resemble evening, and the way to you is weary like the face of Christ. Come, I am breathing drowning, like somebody breathing air from a bottle, but I am green as love, my horse is Arabian, and although my passport is fake, my poems are real, and in my room memories are made.

I love the rattle of my door key among your keys, and the rattle of me among the details of you, and here I am thinking of the past that will happen now, of the warmth that inhabits the distance between your body and the bed, of the sorrow that spreads like a cancer over the map of the world, and your face that travels with me on this earth, as I sit on the edge of the occupation, fishing in the Dead Sea, and thinking of all the stillborn babies, and the wild horses that roam the prairies. Ah, my love, the prophets have lied to us, and the New Testament is no longer new after 20 centuries. Don’t believe the news bulletin, don’t open the door, don’t close the possibilities.

Come, the dinner is hot, and the wine is cool, and the bed is warm. I’ve killed some wayside flowers so my room can come alive and here I am ready to procreate. Don’t let the flower of life wither away. Love is hard when we don’t know how to love, but harder when we do know. Come, perhaps we won’t remember what will happen in the future, and perhaps after all these wars, we will die of love.

Footnote 1:

I have two things to report, the first is bad, and the second is worse. The first is, I love you.

Aria Aber was raised in Germany, where she was born to Afghan parents. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Granta, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) and the forthcoming novel Good Girl (Hogarth, 2025), which will be translated into six languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Nada Alic is the author of the story collection Bad Thoughts (Vintage, 2022) and a forthcoming novel from Knopf. She lives in Los Angeles.

Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet who was born in Damascus and emigrated to Sweden in 2008. He now lives in Berlin and Stockholm. He published four poetry books that were translated widely. His latest book, Adrenalin, was published by Action Books in 2017.

Bettina (1927–2021) lived and worked in the Chelsea Hotel from the 1970s until her death. During these years, the artist, whose full name was Bettina Grossman, generated a vast body of conceptual works in a wide variety of media. Across her projects, she captured a profound experiential understanding of the world around her, one that allowed her to decipher and locate patterns in the rhythmic fluctuations of daily life. After working in New York’s artistic and countercultural scenes for several decades without substantial recognition, she enjoyed a renewed interest in her work in the final years of her life, thanks in large part to the sustained efforts of her friend and collaborator, artist Yto Barrada.

Remica Bingham-Risher, poet and memoirist, is a native of Phoenix. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Her most recent book is Room Swept Home (Wesleyan, 2024). She resides in Norfolk, Virginia, with her husband and children.

Wendi Bootes is a writer, translator, scholar, and educator based in the Bay Area. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Aaron Bornstein is an assistant professor of cognitive sciences at UC Irvine. He has written about bias and misunderstanding in artificial neural networks for Nautilus.

Hermann Burger (1942–89) was a Swiss novelist, poet, and essayist. Burger first achieved fame with his novel Schilten (1976), the story of a mad village schoolteacher who teaches his students to prepare for death. In 1985, he won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.

Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and has translated the work of several Arab writers, including poetry by Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis.

CAConrad’s latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books/UK Penguin, 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, and a Pew Fellowship. They exhibit poems as art objects, with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal.

Jean Chen Ho is the author of Fiona and Jane, named one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2022; selected as a best book of the year by NPR, Vulture, Vogue, Oprah Daily, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle; and long-listed for the Story Prize. She lives in Los Angeles and Upstate New York.

Cynthia Cruz earned a BA in English literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in art writing from the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in German language and literature from Rutgers University. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. Hotel Oblivion (2022), her most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School, where her research focuses on Hegel.

Rachel Cusk is a novelist and writer. Her latest book is called Parade: A Novel.

Constance Debré left her career as a lawyer to become a writer. She is the author of a trilogy of novels: Play Boy (Prix La Coupole, 2018), Love Me Tender (Prix Les Inrockuptibles, 2020), and No Name

Marina Gudelj has written for as long as she can remember. Her debut short story collection, Fantomska bol (“Phantom Pain,” 2020), was nominated for several awards. She lives in Split, where she teaches Croatian language. Her free time is spent more unpredictably.

Peter Holslin is a freelance journalist, music writer, and musician originally from San Diego.

Christopher Kondrich is the author of two books including Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), a winner of the National Poetry Series competition. Recent poems appear in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and New England Review

Leo Lasdun is a writer living in New York; you can find him at Brower Park.

Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. The author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (2021) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (2020), she has work in Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, and elsewhere. See more at chloeAVmartinez.com.

Daniele Pantano is a Swiss poet, essayist, and literary translator. For more information, please visit pantano.ch

David Roderick is the author of The Americans (2014) and Blue Colonial (2006). He directs Left Margin LIT, a creative writing center and workspace for writers in Berkeley. He was an NEA Creative Writing Fellow for 2021–22.

Ira Sachs is an American filmmaker. His latest film is Passages (2023)

Sam Sax is the author of PIG (Scribner, 2023), Yr Dead (McSweeney’s, 2024), Madness (Penguin, 2022), and bury it (Wesleyan, 2018). Sam received fellowships from the NEA, the Academy of American Poets, and Yaddo, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.

Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and co-founder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has received support from ALTA, ACLS, and NEA. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

Claire Shaffer is a writer and archivist from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn. Her past bylines include Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and Pitchfork. She earned her MA in moving image archiving and preservation from NYU in 2023.

Emily Wells is the author of A Matter of Appearance, a memoir (Seven Stories Press, 2023). She teaches writing at UC Irvine.

The Gate (@54thegate on Instagram) is an arts and resource center for people with learning disabilities, based in Shepherd’s Bush, London. It is largely an arts center but sees itself also as a base where visitors can be free to be themselves and express themselves in a creative manner.

Martin Wong (1946–99) was born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Wong was active in the performance art groups the Cockettes and Angels of Light Free Theater before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including Exit Art, Semaphore, and P·P·O·W, before his death in San Francisco from an AIDS-related illness. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Footprints, Poems, and Leaves is made possible, in part, by support from P·P·O·W and Galerie Buchholz.

Sarah Yanni is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. Her work can be found in outlets such as Mizna, Wildness, Full Stop, Iterant, Spectra Poets, and Autostraddle. Despite everything, she is a romantic.

Fiction, Fashion, and Style

From Autumn House Press

Half-Lives

Lynn Schmeidler

“Half-Lives is an extraordinary debut, an endlessly smart, endlessly cool, endlessly moving collection full of evocative desire and wonder.”

—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed Paper $19.95

From Intellect

Tribal and the Cultural Legacy of Streetwear

Edited by G. James Daichendt

Tribal Streetwear is a brand that is inspired by a variety of southern California subcultures, including graffiti, street art, skateboarding, surfing, tattoos, and hip-hop. This collection explores the history of Tribal and its cultural significance. Contributors include both academics and cultural tastemakers. Paper $29.95

From Hirmer Publishers

Roma Artist Ceija Stojka

What Should I Be Afraid of?

Edited by Stephanie Buhmann, Lorely French, Carina Kurta, and Susanne Keppler-Schlesinger

The first English monograph on the artist Ceija Stojka, an Austrian Roma writer, painter, activist, musician, and survivor of the Holocaust. This book presents important examples of the artist’s oeuvre and a selection of previously unpublished poems. Cloth $20.00

From Swan Isle Press

Now in Paperback

Malambo

Lucía Charún-Illescas

Translated by Emmanuel Harris II

“Although it is a fictional account of Afro-Peruvian life in colonial Peru, Malambo calls into question hegemonic assumptions about Spanish American history by underscoring the role that African-descended people played in shaping that history.”—PALARA Paper $28.00

Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu